Need for Speed Unbound review

There was a time when Need For Speed was as guaranteed a Christmas number one spot as a Simon Cowell reality show winner. Before there was Forza Horizon, all festivals and physics, there was this. A Fast and Furious analog with spoilers on its spoilers, every year exactly the same super-accessible arcade racer about underground tuner culture and corrupt cops. And we didn’t care that it was as formulaic as the aforementioned contest winner’s carefully selected Leonard Cohen cover. Until one day, finally, we did. 

Need For Speed grew too big and popular to sustain itself. The sales were too good for EA to start tinkering with the formula, but the yearly releases oversaturated us with beamers in widebody kits and stories of betrayal told exclusively through the medium of checkpoint races. The world that Need For Speed Unbound emerges into, then, has changed. 2019’s NFS Heat was the franchise’s most convincing attempt at reinvention for years, but it couldn’t nudge Forza Horizon off its throne. Nobody can bridge the gap to Playground Games’ behemoth right now. Need For Speed Unbound needs to be something totally distinct to succeed. 

Enter the new art style. This is an old franchise stepping out in its finest zoomer haircut and North Face puffer, hoping to find traction with the TikTok generation through a dramatic change of visual direction. It might seem like an incidental touch, but the anime-inspired smoke plumes and metaverse-ready avatars in Unbound are a real statement of intent for such an established series. When you drift round a corner and light up your tires a cartoon miasma appears, like somebody just let off their ultimate in a nearby Borderlands game. Painterly neon lines whizz around in circles beside your tires during a burnout. Your car literally sprouts a pair of graffiti wings when you catch a ramp and get some air. This, from a game that’s been telling the same po-faced plot about double-crossing street racers and psychopathic law enforcement officials for two decades.