izigame.me

If you haven't played NFS: Heat, do that before playing this. This game is objectively worse and I'm going to go more in depth in this review, while also drawing parallels to Heat as it's a fair comparison. But for those who don't want to stick around for that long, the general gist is that this game is not bad, but disappointing and rushed. But like I said, if you want to know why I think this way keep on reading. I also discovered that the reviews have a character limit so I'll try to summarise.
And no, it's not because of the visuals. You've had to realise by now that all the racing games look the same. The cartoony visuals is a design choice to make the game have an unique feel to it. If you go back to previous NFS titles you can see that all of them have a similar theme. With Heat it was the nightlife with an emphasis on neon lights while in comparison in Unbound it's about the underground racing scene with an emphasis on graffiti. I actually quite like how they did it. It gives you more ways to customise the car and racing becomes more animated. But in the end, it needs to be given a shot before judging, as it is unique enough to not have anything to compare it to.
Unbound features the “burst nitrous”. Basically on top of your normal nitrous that accumulates naturally as you drive on oncoming traffic and by drifting, a second, shorter bar is present. You fill it up doing mostly the same things, drifts, airtime, basically everything else besides oncoming traffic. But the difference is that burst nitrous is way more powerful and it disappears on a timer. So you either need to use it as soon as you get it or keep the current drift to make it more powerful, so player has a choice to either use the lesser boost it gives or wait for a bigger, position-altering boost. It never feels unfair either, it’s just a mechanic I really like and makes the racing more snappy. Definitely something I wouldn’t mind in the future titles, although it doesn’t fit any realistic settings. But that’s really about all the positives I can give the game.
Of course any NFS title wouldn’t be complete without its races. Along with cop chases that’s been their pride and joy, but they took a “different” approach here. You see, they’re radiant and is the major reason I think the game is rushed. You can instigate races by driving to “meetups”, which are some derelict parking lots in different places of the map. All things aside this way of starting the races is a lot better than in Heat, where you just drove to a random place on the street. It’s in these meetups where you get to see the different races available as well as your rivals with short descriptions of them. But actually playing the races is never unique. I feel like there’s maybe ~10 different races in the entire game that just gets recycled over and over. Which makes sense in a way, the races are there to only net you money. But man, does it suck .
Completing these races is your main source of income, but it’s also the way you get heat. A race could give you from anywhere of 0,5 to 2 heat just by completing it. One of my main criticisms of Heat was because it was so night focused, it meant that the cops were dozing off on Xanax during the days. Well, that isn’t the case in Unbound. Because you get heat from races, it means you could very easily get to level 5 heat during the day, and instead of that disappearing when you get to a safehouse, it gets transferred over to the night. Only after the night will it go away. But unlike in Heat, there’s no incentive to get to those higher heat levels because it no longer acts as a money multiplier, but feels like a giant “fuck you” to the players. Heat level 5 becomes a giant slogfest if the conditions aren’t right. Because instead of the rhino from Heat, there’s now a new enforcer type at level 5. It does massive damage even it it as much as scrapes you and it can reach impossible speeds, and on top of that, it also summons Helicopters because why not. At least the helicopters aren’t just floating flood lights from Heat, and can now also instigate chases. The ways to avoid them are by going under something or by turning your car off if it’s night. Which of course, is an improvement. But because they also roam the map outside of chases you find yourself scurrying for cover or turning off your vehicle in the middle of a field all the time.
Instead of being able to progress the game naturally like in Heat, Unbound restricts you from getting a good car. Cars are scored like they were in Heat, but there’s now a rank tied to said score. The lowest being B, the highest is S+. The races also have such restrictions, you can’t for instance roll up to a B –tier race with an A+ tier car. It makes sense. But what it also does is shackle you, because at the end of the week you’re going to need an X –tier car, no less, no more. So effectively, you’re capped at that rank. There’s no use driving an S+ car when all the races are for worse, so why would you want to upgrade your car at all past a certain point? It’s because of this that the early game is slow, both literally and metaphorically. Of course the heat system is unchanged, so you’re going to be escaping from the same ferocious cops at heat level 5 as you would in the later game, because again you need money to progress and to do that you do the repetitive races.
The difficulty in Heat came mostly if not only from the repair stations. You only had three repairs per night or you’re bust. Accompanied with the high heat multiplier it became a skill-based high risk high reward system. So where does the intensivity come from in Unbound? I’ll tell you where, it comes from the amount of restarts you get per a day and night combo. On the easiest difficulty it’s 10 restarts, then it’s 4, then 3 on the hardest. It doesn’t take a genius to see what’s wrong with this. The gap between 10 and 4 is huge, and not only that, you get 3 restarts on the hardest difficulty while the AI opponents are trying their hardest to beat you, while on the easiest difficulty they’re just taking a leisurely stroll on the road and you get 10 attempts to pass them. Why on earth would anyone pick the hardest difficulty when it doesn’t give you more money, if anything it forces you to play more races which again, are always recycled. So it begs the question, if this is a singleplayer game with a focus on entertainment, why isn’t there an option to make a custom difficulty setting? And if you’re curious, you get free repairs in this game but only on 4 minute intervals.
Those are my main gripes, but the unpolishedness can be seen in other things in the game as well, like bugs. For example, opening up the map while escaping from a helicopter under some cover makes it able to see you, restarting the chase. Or the fact that the map doesn’t recenter on the player, or that the minimap doesn’t know if it’s the last lap of the race. There’s just so many visible things wrong with the game it reinforces the idea that the game was pushed out to capitalise on those Christmas sales, which is a shame because Heat was a good game and Unbound had a lot of precedent to exceed it.
But if all you want is an enjoyable driving experience akin to Need for Speed and you’ve exhausted your options, then Unbound is not a bad option. There’s still the elements in this game that makes NFS games so fun, which is why I even played it. You still get to go 400km/h in a school zone and compete in drifting events in a lamborghini. Most of the guardrails are made of cardboard while some out of adamantium. Basic things that makes the series what it is and makes it stick out from the rest. But I’m not going to pretend they didn’t do a better job with Heat, even if this improved on some of the things wrong with it. In the end you can only complete the same race so many times before it gets old when in the previous game that was a non-issue.