Need for Speed Unbound. Game Review and everything else.

Visually it's very appealing.
Screenshots are taken by me while the GIF is from tenor.com using the GIF function.

Need for Speed Unbound

Need for Speed Unbound is a 2022 racing videogame developed by Criterion and published by Electronic Arts, it's the 25th installment of the Need for Speed series of games.

Videos are from the official Need for Speed YouTube account.
https://www.youtube.com/@NeedforSpeed

Now that all of that is over with,

NEED FOR SPEED UNBOUND

A game that's at first glance looks familiar to Initial D which instead of having 3D cars and anime characters and world, this one have 3D cars and world and Spider-verse characters.

I kind of like it, It's pretty nice.

The menus are not made for Ultrawide Monitors though. 😥

Let's start with,

The System Requirements

cut, cropped, and pasted from steam.

Let me start by saying--"Those requirements are really steep!", Now I myself is currently rocking on a Ryzen 1700, 2x8GBs of ram, installed it on an M.2. SSD and a 5700 XT and I'm unhappy to say that even if I had a great time playing it at maxed graphics it wasn't all smooth sailing.

The game requires a decent CPU(current gen) and my Ryzen 1700 wasn't able to make the cut, Even at the lowest graphical setting the CPU requirement remained constant which somewhat affected the experience.

A	B

If you focus your attention on the road in front the car you would notice that in the Photo A, the road lacks reflective properties, while in Photo B the road now has reflective properties.
It's pretty minor but if it happens constantly It starts becoming the pink elephant in the room.

Note: this is the lowest graphics settings, Yeah it looks nice, you can further reduce it in custom settings which the only thing left to change is the texture and image filtering.

The two images above are take from this video, It looks crap because it's a recording and graphics is mostly set to low.

This one looks better, the map is confined to a small area and the graphics setting I believe was set to high.

Your Character

The game allows you to create your own avatar that will be used as the main character in story mode and as well as your character in multiplayer.

You start by selecting a base model, there's no gender selection here which is pretty smart, In story mode your character will always be referred in a gender neutral way such as "Kid" or "Dude".

You can fine tune the details later on,

Hair and accessories as well,

As well as having access to all selection of clothes,

Finally you get to select a victory pose. HEHEHEHEHE.

Your Vehicle

Need For Speed Unbound is a racing game- a street racing game, as that's the case we need a noble steed for our character to ride on.

You are able to choose from a wide variety of car manufacturers,
(No Toyota though, seriously why?)

Customize your ride for how it looks and performs,

From changing body kits to individual parts,

Personalizing your vehicle's license plate to your liking,

Choosing the paint and material of your noble steed,

Putting some custom vinyls and decals to show your artistic side,
(Seriously though I did this by hand, piece by piece, shape by shape.)

You can also customized the special effects and sound effects,

As well as the horn, underglow and air suspension (which only works when you turn off the engine).

Next would be the ability to customize and buy parts to modify your car's performance, increasing your vehicle's capability increases it's Performance Rating(PR) rating which we will tackle later on.

In this game we can swap out entire engine which is really neat.
Note: engine parts upgrades are tied to each individual engine.

And lastly there's this handling tuning which is detrimental on how you play your vehicle, This can make or break your experience and we will tackle it later on in detail.

The World

The location is called Lakeshore City

It's compact and filled with activities and collectibles.

The game has pedestrians that will try to jump out when you try to hit them, unintentionally.

From highways to forest trails, this city has it all.

The Story

The story typical for most Need for Speed games,

competition are not just names but actual characters,

each having their own descriptions and stories.

It's about Street Racing, Family~, and not getting caught by the police, It's Okay.

The Game Structure

Need for Speed is a roguelite rpg on top of an arcade racing game and I love it.

In Story mode, the game is centered around a calendar with each week ending in a qualifier.

Each day is split into day and night, each with their own events. For each completed event you gain a 'Heat' counter, a measure on how much the police wants you arrested. Heat counters gained during the day carry over through the night and resets the next day.

You can check your map and inspect the 'Meet up' for possible events before heading there, You can find information regarding the required tier, the type of event, the buy-in cost, rewards and heat gain for the events available.

I am happy to say that the game doesn't not employ a fast travel function in story mod, There's a good reason for that. To play hide and seek with the police.

In the image above on the top right you can see that I have 158k that I can lose if the cops arrest me.

As you complete events around the map during the day or night, Cash earned is temporary and you need to enter a Garage(Safehouse) to bank it in and in doing so ends the Day or Night.

If you don't get to a garage and get caught by the police, well... they confiscate your hard earned money and the day or night ends.

There are five types of police vehicles that will hunt you down, each have their own characteristics.

Specially the undercover unit, they have the ability to deploy spike strips.

Which slows your vehicle for a good period of time.

Or the Heavy Unit's helicopter support, which you can hide from by turning off your engine.

You might be thinking, "just run away" right? But this game employs a health system.

You can repair your car by passing through Gas stations littered all over the map every four minutes, Yeah, there's a cooldown.

Despite the risk, Cop chases are an alternative source of cash, rewarding $100/$250/$500/$1000/$2500 depending on the heat counter at the time of a successful escape, an Auxiliary equipment seems to boost this as well.

PROTIP: while being chased by the cops in free roam, you can quit the game to save yourself from being caught. It's a nice feature.

Performance Rating Tiers

Meetup Events are divided into five PR tiers--B, A, A+,S , and S+.
Each tier represents a car's performance including its upgrades and tuning.

Tiers have a sort of range in them, Tier B is between 100-159, Tier A is between 160-209, Tier A+ is between 210-269, Tier S is between 270-329, and finally Tier S+ which is 330 and beyond.

It's recommended to get the highest possible PR rating for each tier to get the best possible outcome. Sidebets are well...bets between you and another racer in a race, Bet amount is based on your PR rating, the lower your PR rating on a given Tier, the higher the bet value.

FWD, RWD, AWD?

Each car will have one of these drivetrain.

FWD or Front Wheel Drive - The engine makes the front wheel turn in order for the car to move, higher top speed than an AWD, somewhat better at taking a turn compared to RWD, tends to understeer, and Fuel efficient which doesn't matter in a racing game.
RWD or Rear Wheel Drive - The engine makes the rear wheel turn in order for the car to move, highest top speed, overall better than FWD, tends to oversteer, there's a reason almost all sports car have this.
AWD or All Wheel Drive - not to be confused to 4WD, in AWD the engine makes all the wheels turn independently(by a computer) in order for the car to move, Best acceleration, Best Cornering, Worse Top speed, Best for off road, difficult to drift, Worse Fuel efficiency which again doesn't matter in a racing game.

Grip, Drift, Or Maybe In Between

Need for Speed Unbound is an arcade racing game after all and for better or worse let's you pick a playstyle between grip driving or drift driving.

Depending on the car's characteristics and upgrades you are able to designate if your playstyle is grip or drift, It's best to prioritize one over the other because it's a source of nitrous boost if done well.

I recommend enabling traction control and disabling drift entry if going grip, adversely, If going drift I recommend disabling traction control and enabling drift entry.

Specialization

Specc'ing is a tuner's dream or any minmaxer in a rpg.

This turbo charger for example ONLY increases performance when reaching high speeds.
Turbochargers uses a turbine connected to an exhaust, a Supercharger uses engine power.

There are also selection where you gain more stats on roads than off road, increased cornering or drift.

Game Difficulty and Colorblind Mode

The game has three ranks of difficulty, Relaxed, Challenging and Intense.

Restarts means you can only restart an event a number of times depending on difficulty per day which adds another level of frustration to this game's roguelite nature.

The game also has Colorblind features which is nice to have.

Sounds Effect and Music

the sound effects are great, you can edit exhaust sounds, engine sounds and nitrous sounds for your own unique style.

The music is...okay.

haha with these two songs I believe you could take a guess on what's the music playlist would be like, it's not atrocious, it's okay, It includes non-english songs which is pretty great.

Online Multiplayer

Online multiplayer is okay, not amazing but it does the job.

Public multiplayer is a free roam session based, there are 16 players in a session. The way races are managed is if someone create an event and other players in the session join in, There's also no heat gain on events and you can fast travel between points of interests.
The game doesn't have ranked mode or matchmaking but like I said it's does it's job.

It's fun.

Insert "Best car for each tier."

Online Multiplayer is where you get to brag your Pose and style hahahaha.

Final Thoughts

Need for Speed Unbound is pretty good, during the day it reminds me of NFS: Most Wanted and during the night it reminds me of NFS Underground 2.

At first I was very frustrated with the mechanics and what not but when I did understood I thought to myself, 'WOW, this is nice'. With the unpredictability of street racing paired with the RNG of police cars hunting you down, Plus the limited amount of restarts.

THIS IS AN EXCELLENT ROGUELITE STREET RACING GAME.

Online Multiplayer is pretty amazing and it reminds me of the time when I was a kid playing in arcades with friends, The cars are not balanced and that's a good thing, but it does also imply that some cars are better than the others at a given tier.

The story is pretty nice as well, it tackles street racing, money, betrayals, redemption, and forgiveness.

When I rate things, I always use a three-point system.
1 for Bad
2 for Okay
3 for Great

I must point out that I have very low standards and is easily impressed.
so it's very hard for me to give a score of 1,
and very easy for me to give a score of 3.

Need for Speed Unbound, 2022. 3/3, It's really good.

The Good.

Roguelite.
RNGesus.
Arcade Racing.
Day/Night Cycle.
Graphics are amazing.
Sounds are amazing.
Choose your playstyle.
Multiplayer is mostly good.
Having separate Performance Tiers means you don't need to always play cars with ludicrous speed.
No guns, no drugs, just cars.
Pedestrians.
Character Customization.
Vehicle Customization.
Cops are very frustrating.
Alt+F4 to escape cops as a feature!
Driving really fast feels really good.

The Bad.

RNGesus.
Arcade Racing.
Cops are very frustrating.
Lack of in-depth information regarding how performance works.
Not all objects that you though are destructible are not destructible.
You can't remove specific songs from the in-game playlist.

The Neutral.

System Requirements are too steep.
I wish it had Pursuit Breakers from NFS: Most Wanted.
I wish it had Decal Grouping like in Forza Horizon 4.
No Toyota.

Thank you @jijisaurart and @arcgspy for the inspiration for making decals in your likeness. It's fun for me.

Haha.

Thanks for reading, Bye for now.