Need for Speed Unbound - No Country for Old Men

Electronic Arts is now in its second decade of heavy losses in the battle against the shadows. Even though the Need for Speed series no longer attracts a mass audience, the struggle with the duckling syndrome continues. The indelible mark of Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005) is like first love. It's not that the experience that follows will be worse, but the first crush will always feel like something special. And Need for Speed Unbound is the first installment that has a chance of becoming such a childhood monument for a younger audience, and here's why...

Let's dot all the dots

Need for Speed Unbound is objectively better than Need for Mast Wanted (2005). If this information made you soar to the ceiling on the natural pull of nitrous oxide, I understand you. To say that is an assault on the sacred...

Before the release of Need for Speed Unbound, there were a lot of concerns about the controversial visual style, referring to the anime and Fortnite. But the end result is a very specific style. Specific, not lousy. Lousy stylistics is the dissonance of components, when one element looks inappropriate in the context of the game. Take another arcade game, TRAIL OUT, as an example. Yes, TRAIL OUT is at least not a bad game, but the author thought it appropriate to insert so many references that TRAIL OUT itself has no face of its own. Everything, including maps, characters, story, modes and the root mechanics of the game is something that has already been invented and cut to perfection. The trick, the references, are not done in an Easter egg format, but are done right in the forehead, leaving the player with no way to unravel the hint. An example of a good reference: At a certain point in Witcher III: Wild Hunt, Ciri tells Geralt that she has been to the future. And there, in a marvelous new world, there are flying wagons everywhere, and people have iron things sticking out of their heads - not the hardest hint to Cyberpunk 2077.

Need for Speed Unbound has its own face. For once, we didn't get a combination of Underground and Most Wanted, but something distinctive. Too much of an amateur, but distinctive...

The second reason why Need for Speed Unbound was cheated was the naive dialogues, trivial plot and too young characters, as if they have grown up on the Tik-Tok trends. Yes, the Unbound characters will only evoke sympathy from an immature mind, and now recall the dialogues and characters of everyone's favorite Most Wanted: a cliched, smug antagonist with an exorbitant ego and fourteen characters who are all trying to look cool, busy guys on the dough. The exception: Sergeant Nathan Cross, whose dialogue insertions may not have shone with Tarantino's talent, but the actor playing Cross was able to breathe life into his character. You can watch all the Need for Mast Wanted cutscenes and see for yourself.

The third reason for the hype is the supposedly inappropriate anime effects. The developers from Criterion Games were so scared of the wave of players' indignation, that they promised to add the ability to disable these effects...

...but on release it turned out to be impossible to turn off this visual feature. Criterion Games didn't backtrack and, despite the expected abuse, did it their way...and they got it right. Let the purple smoke from burnt rubber look like a JPG and looks controversial, but it makes the game recognizable. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of taste. But why did everyone love Need for Speed Most Wanted so much? Largely because of its stylistic integrity. Autumn landscapes in an industrial town, a lot of graffiti and God-like soundtrack, charging for aggressive driving - all this gave birth to the rebellious spirit of street racing in 2005.

The fourth reason for the hype is the unhealthy "narrative," the speculation of fashionable clothing brands in character customization and the marketing campaign around the appearance of rap singer A$AP Rocky in the game. The heckling here is absolutely justified. Bending to the demands of tolerance at the expense of fan tastes is wrong. Promoting brands' clothing for the sake of a profit raise is fine, but fans aren't interested. Relying on a celebrity to raise more hype around the game and make it mega-successful - well, well, good luck. Call of Duty: Ghosts was promoted by Marshall Bruce Mathers III himself, better known as Eminem. Is anyone interested in Call of Duty: Ghosts at this point? That's right. Gone into oblivion.

And now we can get started.

Is there really a middle ground?

This time Need for Speed moved to a fictional city, the prototype of which was Chicago. In the mornings the traffic on the streets is dense, while at night it's always raining. The lighting during the daylight hours is clearly overdone. There is too much light in the game. They wanted to show the beauty of the lighting, but made it look like you're rolling around under a powerful projector, the lighting is terrible:

Night races were created as if to demonstrate the power of Frostbyte and its dynamic wetting of surfaces. Night races look organic, but still the level of graphics is not Next-Gen and not even the level of Need for Speed (2015), although the requirements of Need for Speed Unbound is much higher than the game of 2015:

As a rule, it is inexpedient to write about graphics in reviews. Even modern monitors have not yet learned to translate Braille, and the sighted and so will appreciate the picture from their bell tower, but Need for Speed Unbound - the exception to the rule. Despite the degraded visuals since 2015, the new NFS manages to deliver 60 frames per second on the Xbox Series X - the first Need for Speed ever to boast sensible optimization on consoles, even on the Xbox Series S the framerate to visual ratio is pleasing. Everything has a price, this time the price of performance - in some places soapy graphics and the occasional glaringly sharp polygons.

Plot?

The plot is similar to the beloved Most Wanted 2005: again, the protagonist gets his car stolen, which he wants to get back by winning it from the offender. It is funny, that unlike Most Wanted, the initial car in Need for Speed Unbound is not so cool. The player should rather be motivated by a thirst to restore justice. In the course of the passing there are so many luxury sports cars, that the initial car turns into a trinket by the final.

You can not expect deep character development. Local characters, as if escaped from the battlefields of Fortnite, will cause disgust in any boomer. The main thing is that you don't feel Spanish shame on the screen too often, as it was...okay, let's not talk about sad things.

How many cars in the game

There are a little less than 150 types of cars to choose from, so it's not worth relying on the uniqueness of each of them. We were promised full customization of each car, but in fact, the promises turned out to be half-true.

Yes, you can customize almost anything: from fenders to rear view mirrors - Need for Speed car tuning amazes with its variety for the first time in five years. But the division of all cars to sharpen the clutch and drift turned out to be too rigid: blind from one to the other will not work. There is no fine-tuning of driving.

If for you the tuning of Need for Speed: Underground 2 remained the benchmark, then Need for Speed Unbound in this respect will seem no worse. The visual tuning constructor is simply impossible to make more variation. Vinyls are not applied according to predetermined templates, but offer the feeling of being an expert in an exclusive paint job.

Sets of vinyls are regularly updated with the works of the community, some works are not ashamed to look for multiplayer. There is no point in ranting about the multiplayer, it is terrible: the parties are divided into eight people, six of whom are always busy - mom called to eat:

Not all vinyls from the community were created for decor, some were created for fun. To fool around and put something like that on a car is priceless. Need for Speed Unbound isn't trying to be serious.

Tuning the performance of cars is exorbitantly expensive, but relatively customizable. All cars are tuned either for clutch or for drifting. And if you buy a car with an emphasis on drifting, and then want to convert it to a clutch, you are in for a lot of pain. Fortunately, the cars have more or less adequate driving physics, but an inadequately abrupt transition from controlled driving to dashing drifting. Before buying, you should already know the final assembly of the car, for what purposes: to race sprints or to score drifting points. You will not find a universal solution.

You need a certain class of automobile for certain race - B, A, A+, S, S+. The times when you could pass the whole game in a stock car are long past. Speaking of difficulty...

Challenge in NFS? This is something new.

The game is divided into weeks. Each day will have both day and night races. The logic of Heat has been tweaked, and now both day and night races carry money.

During the day there are more races, but the reward is less, and at night there are fewer races, but the prize is the same. After each race, the level of the search increases, and the reward for the race you get only after arriving in the garage, where the level of the search is canceled. Here reveals an unexpected gambling element: money is constantly in short supply, and with each race you risk running into the patrolmen. It doesn't sound scary, until you learn the laws by which the local economy works...

Now you need a starting fee to participate in races, and there is no spam restart, on minimum difficulty you can start the race first 10 times, on medium - only 4. Again, 4 restarts seems quite enough until you personally try to be the first to cross the finish line.

But even having snapped the jackpot, overtaking everyone and winning all the bets, the player will see the big money only closer to the end of the game. The first five hours of Need for Speed Unbound are accompanied by agonizing accumulation of money for the necessary details. Money is constantly not enough. The challenge is that by playing too risky and overconfident, you're almost guaranteed to lose what you've won after an unfortunate encounter with the police. And playing too passively - you risk not to pump your car. Of course, with a vicious circle of injustice, you can and should fight. But ... and here's the catch - from now on, no quick moves. On the activity you go yourself, learn the map, do not ignore the side tasks.

Before, there was absolutely no point in free riding, except for aesthetic pleasure. Now there are small "gifts" scattered on the map for attentive players: knock down billboards, piñata, find graffiti on the walls - earn a little money.

The chore of racing, police chases, and joyrides is exorbitantly tiring, which is one of the reasons why Need for Speed Unbound is widely criticized. This is not the kind of game where you can relax, tuning anything and everything, crashing into fences and winning. The local destruction system is full of unpleasant surprises: some objects are blown to rubble by a single touch, when you collide with others, your car flies into the stratosphere, but it is almost impossible to distinguish these obstacles visually.

Police...normal.

When the sun goes down, not only the bad guys wake up, but also the cops. In Heat, the cops were a pain in the ass. In Unbound, the cops aren't as tough, but they're no less aggressive, so we can breathe. However, with cops it was a misfortune: at first the police pose no threat, but worth playing just an hour - a sharp jump in difficulty.

Unfortunately, the guardians of the law here are not very different from those who were in everyone's favorite Most Wandet 2005 release: they take the quantity, fat and impudence, but not tactical maneuvers. Tactics shifted on the shoulders of the player, because the level of search depends on what kind of cops you have to compete with. Some are more profitable to ram:

With others in a head-on collision, it is better not to enter, but to use the smaller dimensions of your car and maneuver:

Thirds are invisible at all on the mini-map. The obligatory condition with the chases with the kush in hand added in Need for Speed Unbound, unexpectedly, an element of stealth. As in Need for Speed Heat, the engine can be shut down by pressing the right key - an ultimally important feature. It should dial at least 4 lights of the search, as immediately raids the whole armada, the roads block the roadblocks, in the sky, like corpse flies, circling around the annoying, all-seeing helicopters. Sometimes you have to hide in the bushes for five or ten minutes from the cops, until the patrol scans the area nearby. The only consolation - now the police do not spot the player's car immediately, but it takes some time to identify it:

The physics of the cars are not conducive to boarding, undercutting, much less head-on collisions. Each chase from the police is more like a war of attrition than a blitzkrieg. What's most unfortunate, though, is that by moving to another car, you don't reset the level of the chase. Yes, game convention, yes, for the sake of balance, but this convention does not make the game more difficult, it only forces the player to save his earnings from the clutches of the police time and time again - a little infuriating.

Conclusions

If we judge Need for Speed Unbound, abstracting from the previous parts - this game may well cost about $30, but if you remember the existence of Need for Speed (2015) and Need for Speed: Heat - buy only at a huge discount. Those who have long fallen out of the Need for Speed series can recommend Need for Speed Unbound, but with a caveat. Stylistics and entourage of the game is well deserved not accept old fans, this NFS too youthful. In addition the local soundtrack is unlikely to add to anyone's playlists. The music in Need for Speed has always been exemplary, but in Need for Speed Unbound it is exemplary bad - crappy instrumental, rap does not rock, and in general the compositions do not fit stylistically in one game.