Need for Speed Unbound Review

ign.com:

No other racing game released this year looks quite like Need for Speed Unbound, and that can be a difficult thing to achieve in such an established genre so steeped in convention. Criterion has gone all-in with wild, animated visual flair that often appears as though it’s been lifted from the pages of a comic book, even as the actual driving and split day/night structure of its races are immediately familiar to those of us who appreciated 2019’s Need for Speed Heat. The result is a uniquely styled racer that regularly looks quite fabulous in motion, though its grating story mode goes over like a banana in the tailpipe and the online mode simply feels stripped down and unfinished.

While Heat hardly revolutionised arcade racing, it was a pleasant surprise that put the teetering franchise back on track. For its efforts, developer Ghost Games was… disbanded, and the series drunk dialled its way back into the arms of former flame Criterion Games for Unbound, and it’s received a striking makeover. You can apply artistic embellishments, including smoke and illustrations, to cars like any other visual customisation part. There are a variety of different ones to choose from, although essentially they all seem fairly similar, with the key differences between them mostly limited to the colour of the smoke and the selection of graphics that get thrust from the sides of your car like wings, or flashed above the roof like a tiny, temporary hat. The effects you choose are globally applied to your whole garage, though, and it seems like an oversight that you can’t select bespoke effects for individual cars.

It’s all very stylish in an Into the Spider-Verse, street art kind of way, and I do admire Criterion’s commitment to trialling