The graphics leave much to be desired, but if you stick it through you’ll experience thrilling drives and epic street races
(Picture: Need for Speed)Anyone expecting a return to the early noughties glory days of Need for Speed may be baffled by the first two hours of Unbound. There’s a sense it’s a game that’s trying too hard, mixing almost photorealistic graphics with swirling, smoking graffiti effects as you drift around a corner, and committing many of the same sins as, well, every other recent Need for Speed. Hackneyed betrayal and revenge plot? Check. Dialogue that reads like a 40-something guy’s take on how 20-something street racers might sound? Ditto. If there’s a fine line between cringe and cool, Unbound walks it like a driver caught speeding after one too many.
Stick with it. The story gets more interesting and isn’t really that important. The chat gets easier on the ears. The city it all takes place in, Lakeshore, is an authentic-feeling mass of downtown shopping districts, suburbs and industrial zones. Most importantly, the street racing is fantastic.
Early on it feels like you’re struggling to keep up with rival racers, gulping on their exhaust smoke as they speed across the finish line. But once you get the hang of the drift-heavy handling clicks, you earn the cash for a few judicious upgrades and suddenly you’re back in the frame. When that happens, it makes for one of the most thrilling drives in years, as you slalom through traffic, smash through cones and barriers on dangerously tight corners and battle your way to the front.
It wouldn’t be Need for Speed without cop chases, and the patrol cars are everywhere, trying to block and sideswipe you off the road while you’re racing, and doing their best to take you down before you can ditch them and escape to the nearest safe house. Unbound never quite hits the same levels of scenery-wrecking carnage as 2005’s Most Wanted or its 2012 remake, but as the police interceptors home in and the choppers track you overhead, it’s still pulse-pounding stuff.
Most of all, this is a Criterion Games effort, brought to you the same studio behind the series high-point, Hot Pursuit, and the superb Burnout series. You can see it in the wealth of side activities that dot the huge, open map, with billboards to smash, ramps to jump off and dubiously acquired supercars that need to be picked up and driven fast to a drop-off point, often with the cops right on your tail. You can also see it in the ludicrous Takeover events, which swap the usual races and drift challenges for stunt courses filled with targets to smash to maintain your bonus multiplier. Unbound might be dumb, but like the Fast and Furious movies, it never takes itself too seriously. Above all else, it’s here to entertain.
At that, it excels. Twenty minutes in, I had this tagged as a huge disappointment. Six hours later, I was laser-focused on winning enough races to bank some cash to supe up my ride and make the entry fee for the first of four epic underground championship qualifiers. Forget sleep and keep the coffee flowing – when you live your life a quarter mile at a time, nothing else matters. Great-looking, daft and maddeningly addictive. What else would you want from Need for Speed?
