I don’t play racing games, but I love Need for Speed Unbound

Racing games have always been a genre I’ve rarely bothered with, outside of the arcadey/kart-racer style games, such as the Mario Kart and Wipeout series. After recently picking up a month of EA Play to try out some other titles, I decided to broaden my horizons and give Need for Speed Unbound a try, and I am glad I did.

The story is nothing to write home about, but that was to be expected. The player is an orphan, fostered and eventually raised by Rydell, the owner of Rydell’s Rides and an ex-street racer. Living alongside Jasmine, another orphan, you work together to refurbish an old car. However, after falling in with some… unsavoury people, Jasmine betrays you and Rydell, stealing all the cars from the garage alongside the car you both worked on. After a short time skip, Jasmine reappears with a proposition to the street racing community — The Grand — a multi-race tournament set over the course of four weeks, with the winner taking home an incredible amount of cash. This is also the opportunity to beat Jasmine and finally win back your car.

The gameplay loop is really what stands out in this title; each day is broken up into two times, day and night, which each gives access to different events and challenges. The nighttime traditionally offers up riskier, much more lucrative opportunities. As more and more events are completed each day, the player's heat will increase up to a maximum of five. The higher the heat, the more dangerous and higher number of cops will show up. This leads to the first thing that I really loved — the risk-reward of having to decide how high to take the heat and risk more and more of your earnings before escaping to end the day; this all ties into the main progression of the game too. As previously stated, every in-game week has the next stage of qualifiers for The Grand; these require a hefty buy-in that not only wins you a new car but also earns you good money and allows you to progress to the next tier of qualifiers.

Admittedly, this does also showcase the first and one of the few issues I’ve had thus far, which is the incredibly stingy economy. Each progressing qualifier requires a higher-tier vehicle, along with an even pricier buy-in. It’s very difficult to balance upgrading and buying new cars and making sure you’re prepared for the qualifiers. This doesn’t break the game outright, allowing you to replay the previous day as much as necessary to afford qualifiers, but it does feel like a somewhat flawed system which requires a little too much min-maxing for my liking.

The gameplay itself feels incredibly satisfying, the cars all feel comfortably distinct, and the lack of any direct vehicular progression does lead to some fun choices, allowing you to use the ones you like instead of being railroaded into picking between 2-3 vehicles, which are statistically the best. There’s an inherent satisfaction to finding a relatively low-end car and upgrading it so it not only looks good but vastly outperforms its previous form. The controls feel quite arcadey, allowing them to be very accessible and focusing the difficulty in a much more interesting area: routing. Instead of having to perfectly micromanage all the controls like many racers, the prime improvement comes from getting comfortable with the vehicle you’re driving, and better routing and pathing out races, figuring out the best drift lines to maximise nitrous and finding shortcuts to outmanoeuvre other racers. Many of the races are also very frantic; this is due to the nature of street races, as police will get involved along with civilian cars being on the road, requiring on-the-fly adjustments to avoid devastating accidents.

Outside of all the traditional races, there are other events, such as Drift Events, which require players to earn a high score by drifting and building a high combo, and Takeovers, which task the player with performing stunts and demolishing objects along the track to earn a high score. There are also multiple collectibles, from billboards you can smash to hidden bear statues and street art to collect; they all reward money along with additional cosmetics for car customisation. This ties in with gorgeous and incredibly stylised visuals to help make very varied car designs, making them truly feel unique.

The game's general feel, along with the combination of mechanics and systems at play, really allowed this game to click with me, and while it may not get me obsessed with racing games, it’s definitely one of my favourite experiences I’ve had in the genre.