After the conditional failure of NFS Carbon (about 4 million copies sold against 16 million in Most Wanted – the previous part), the series was drawn to experiments. ProStreet was requalified as a legal race, the Shift sub-series moved to the field of car simulators, The Run had a full-fledged hero and QTE elements and was one of the first attempts by EA to transplant all internal studios to the Frostbite engine.
In 2015, they tried to restart the series, which for the past 10 years had been languishing in uncertainty and which had passed from hand to hand of several studios. Criterion Games, the authors of the Burnout series and two Need for Speed reboots: Hot Pursuit (2010) and Most Wanted (2012), are also returning to the series after 10 years. And looking ahead, Need for Speed Unbound is the first truly successful NFS installment in a very long time.
The plot is not the main thing?
Need for Speed Unbound belongs to the category of story NFS. At the beginning of the game, you are given the opportunity to create your own character without any gender restrictions regarding appearance, voice or clothing. Creating a man with a female voice and wearing tight leggings and a bra is easy. There is a lot of clothes, there are even sets of well-known brands, but there was no place for pink gentlemen, this is a minus.
Course
FINANCIAL ANALYSIS
Our hero and his partner help the local garage owner and at the same time participate in street races. After a prologue of more than two hours, we are left with an empty space, the owner of the garage is depressed, and offscreen, the most successful order of the workshop for the next two years is changing the oil in some grandmother’s Taratai.
But at one point in the life of the hero, a sponsor appears, ready to finance the workshop, buy a normal car and help win the Great Race, which is organized by the person who robbed our garage. For the hero, this is a chance to take revenge, and also to earn a decent sum. But to begin with, you need to pass three qualifications and prepare cars of different classes for the final race. There are four weeks to prepare. This is how our journey of restoring justice begins.
Slow turtle
As in the previous part, Heat, races are held day and night, the Heat system has also returned – conditional stars of interest to traffic law enforcement agencies. Each race adds a part of the star to our rating, at the beginning it is 0.5-1 star, then more. Stars are awarded only in races.
All stars earned during the day are transferred to the night shift of the competition. At the beginning, I did not pay attention to them and completed all the tasks, because there was a catastrophic lack of money and on the very first night I was caught for speeding, and all the money was also taken, which is $ 12 thousand, which is a very large amount at the beginning of the game ( screenshot above).
In order to save all the accumulations for the day/night, you need to successfully reach the Refuge, then the money is transferred to the general bank, and after the night races, the Heat is canceled and a new day starts with a clean slate, although in the third week of the competition, the police organize a raid on street racers and at the beginning of the day already we permanently have one Zhara star.
Already from the middle of the first week, I recommend gaining no more than three stars during the day, otherwise it will be difficult at night to even just get to the first competitions, and after that you can do everything until you get bored or have enough money. Yes, for each race, as it should be, they ask for an entry fee, additionally you can bet a few hundred with a specific driver, which of you will reach the finish line earlier.
If you have zeroes, there are several free competitions, but the winnings there are also appropriate. In addition to races, money can be earned by completing additional tests, which are given three times a day. The night trials are mostly connected with the police and the destruction of state property. Days are more peaceful, like passing traffic or going last in a race for 20-30 seconds.
Money is also given for finding collectibles: found graffiti can be applied to a car, porcelain bears, or fly through billboards. Having collected a certain number of such trophies, another visual effect or element of external tuning will open. And of course, for successfully escaping from the Organs, they also give a few bucks, and the higher the level of heat, the more evergreens you can get. In the early stages, I’ve had more money in a single night running from the cops multiple times at max Heat than I did racing.
Separately, I advise you not to miss additional orders for driving a car to the specified place, so you will receive a guaranteed reward, and you will also ride on exotic and super-fast cars that are not available at this stage of the game. It is also mandatory to deliver a colleague-racer home.
The latter have a limited-time offer, but for successful completion you will open a new Shelter, which will make it easier to escape from the police, or allow less time to get to the right race at the beginning of the day/night. I missed one such job as a taxi driver because I didn’t have time to get rid of my hangovers.
At the beginning of the game, our main task is simply to collect money, regardless of which place we take in the race. And in fact, you will not be able to win in the first races, the minimum plan is to recoup the cost of the ticket, in the best case, to earn a few bucks to improve the car.
Each race has a limited number of restarts, on medium difficulty there are only four, but there can be less, so you need to be sure that the next attempt will be better. Thus, the developers do not let you get stuck on a specific race, which is actually only a plus. In addition, the opponents do not give in, and if their car is faster than yours, then the only way to defeat the opponent is by a trick or a dirty deed, trying to throw him off the track. Although there will be races in which only victory is needed.
Fast hare
There are 5 car ranks in total: B, A, A+, S and S+, by the end of the game you must own a car of each rank. The opportunity to fight for the first place and the maximum profit will appear when you bring the car to the peak of the current rank, for this we improve the engine and chassis, all according to the classics. This stage of the game is really interesting. Each engine upgrade fills the Rank scale and sometimes you have to sacrifice, for example, mobility for higher speed or faster acceleration, which is useful for winding tracks, but here with each car individually.
If you reach the maximum, your car will be able to defeat the opponents, and it is worth adding another improvement, as it will take the iron horse to the next Rank, where the winnings are more, but the opponents are also meaner, and until you collect the money to pump the car to a decent level, in the race you will be somewhere in the middle of the list. And here you have to look at the prize fund, in some races for the first place in the weaker category they give less money than for the 4th or 5th place among the races of the senior Rank, and sometimes vice versa.
There are four types of races in total: drift, sprint and ring races. There is no drag (straight line racing), instead a new type has been introduced, organized by the soundtrack’s digitized headliner, A$AP. The task is as follows, you need to drive the allotted number of laps as stylishly as possible: drift, hit jumps, knock down chips and barrels of paint. Whoever gets the most points wins, this type of race is the easiest and a great way to earn a few extra bucks.
The car upgrade menu is eye-rolling at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty neat and simple. The upgrade is conditionally divided into four subcategories: those affecting engine power, running gear, separate engine and perks. The latter give various bonuses, for example, increase the strength of the car when it hits the environment or the police; or, for example, increase the amount of nitro obtained during drifting, cleanly passing a turn or being in an airbag behind an enemy, and all these are separate perks, of which only two can be active.
Each car has several engines and this adds another task to buy a more powerful engine or improve the current one, and in fact there is no obvious solution here, for some cars the engines stand like a good supercar. All parts and engines have different quality levels, which can be accessed by upgrading the Workshop.
Thanks to simple but extensive settings, almost any car can be firmly glued to the track, or made the king of the drift. As long as you have one car, it will be difficult to compete equally well in classic races and during drifting, you can radically rebuild a car only in a garage, and it is almost impossible to drift on a car with good grip on the track, and the choice of drift rubber, asphalt or dirt road.
The external tuning of the car here is at some sky-high level, you can cover the entire car in several layers, inscriptions, graffiti, logos, patterns, a lot of everything. At first I was too lazy to go to this menu item, but later I gave up and decorated my Mitsubishi Eclipse (Eclipse) in the color of the starry sky. There are also a lot of different weights, for the lazy, like me, there are ready-made sets.
Separately, I would like to mention the anime smoke and effect, which caused many questions at the announcement. Let me explain, the effect does not interfere at all, it even performs a gameplay function. In addition to the standard supply of nitrous oxide, which dissolves quickly and accumulates slowly, there is a second scale that fills when performing tricks. Entered a turn while drifting, received some amount of nitrogen, passed the turn smoothly without drifting, also received an increase, stayed behind the enemy in an airbag or drove as close as possible to traffic, all this gives a bonus supply of nitro, but there is a nuance.
The additional scale goes down very quickly and you need to decide on the go, use the stock that has already been accumulated, or try to collect the maximum level from which the speed bonus is the largest. In total, bonus nitro has three levels, when using the first, the car is covered with a barely noticeable effect of sparks, at the second level, the outline of the wings appears, and at the third level, the wings are already filled. When you reach each level, an additional effect also appears above the car, and the most important thing is that the opponents have the same system.
In particularly intense races, even a fraction of a second’s distraction can cost you victory, and this kind of decision puts all the information directly on the car where you focus all your attention. It also allows you to assess which acceleration the opponent used.
Well, among many effects there is one called Heroyam Slava in Ukrainian national colors, it opens after opening three Vaults.
The most cunning wins
And finally, a few words about how the new NFS actually plays. In any game with cars, the physical model is in the first place, in Unbound it is not bad, they finally managed to overcome Frostbite, but first you need to get used to it, although a similar stage of adaptation is characteristic of every representative of the genre. I’ve been playing racing for a long time and got used to the physics in the duration of the prologue, that is, in two hours.
Of course, not everything is so smooth and often moving fails with physics, I’m sure you’ve already seen a video on the Internet, how a car somersaults over several hundred meters, gets on its wheels and drives on. In fact, such circus acts are very rare. Separately, I will mention the physics of the destruction of fences and other oversized objects.
In such games, for better optimization and economy of the console/PC power budget (not to be confused with the game budget), whole objects at the moment of impact are replaced with already destroyed ones. At speed, the player still won’t notice the difference between a real-time physics fence collapsing or a whole piece of pole being replaced with a broken one, but the game suffers fewer performance issues. The disadvantage of such a solution is the interest of players in the physics of destruction at practically pedestrian speed and often it is surprising.
About an important component of the game – law enforcement. At a low level of Heat, they are quite calm, recognize you for a long time and catch up rather lazily. The fun begins with four and five stars (though not stars here, but lights). There are more types of policemen, a helicopter is added, and sometimes two, their viewing radius and recognition speed increase. They cut, do not give up brute force, try to knock off the track or press against the wall.
According to feelings, during the race they become more aggressive, in the second qualifying round I wanted to break the DualSense, so much they were constantly knocking me off the track, throwing me into the abyss or simply knocking me out of the checkpoint. And you understand with your mind that everything is fair, the game doesn’t read, but emotions take over when you’ve already used three attempts, there’s only one left, and the cops are catching up before the dangerous turn over the abyss.
If the police practically destroyed our car, yes, there is a health scale here, you can quickly repair it by driving past a gas station, but such an express repair has a cooldown of 4 minutes, and if the car is light, it breaks down in a matter of seconds.
In the open world, it’s really fun to fight with the police, but with a 5-star level of Heat, it’s almost impossible to go through at least a third of the map without getting caught by a patrol, and later it starts to get annoying, but there is a way out – to take up races with a low level of Heat, sacrificing earnings.
In Unbound, there is also a special kind of ninja cops that are invisible on the radar and turn on the flash only when they notice you. A great way to avoid getting caught by cops is to drive through fields and forests. It’s also often the fastest way to get to where you want to go, because GPS often maps the route exclusively on roads, which is correct, but not always the shortest route.
The map here is standard for the genre, there is a city, suburbs and industrial zones, farmland, forests, lakes, etc. The city is populated not only by traffic, but also by people who run very funny when you try to run them over.
I’ve seen comments that the city feels empty, which is actually a convention of the genre, because if you fill the metropolis with a realistic amount of traffic, the game will turn into a traffic jam simulator. I will say even more, this world feels more alive than most representatives of the genre and traffic and pedestrians are not its main component.
First of all, these are people. Each driver here is an individual with their own car and story, there is even a transgender, which I noticed at the 20th hour of the game. For many, this will be a summons, but for me it is a manifestation of today’s realities of life and nothing more. For example, one female rider participates only in races with a big bump and it is really very difficult to overtake her. The other contestant is Muslim and does not accept personal bets on races.
During races, opponents constantly comment if they are cut, overtaken or rammed, or when they overtake you, and each person makes a manner characteristic of his character. By the way, we have access to the police radio wave and during the pursuit they like to dare a strong word in our address.
In the moments of driving a colleague to the Asylum, which I mentioned earlier, he will definitely tell some fable, one shared the story of how one anime changed his life, described it and emphasized that it is not just cartoons, but a separate genre and style. Each delivery of a car also has its own story, that there was revenge on a traitorous boyfriend or that the children took their father’s car without permission, he declared it wanted (the cops are looking for it) and now the child asks to deliver the car home so that the father does not take off the seat belt. And another order is related to the cult part of the series, which will give an influx of nostalgia and a lot of positive emotions.
There are also city mayoral elections and two candidates constantly make speeches on the radio, one sees street racers as a threat to the city and promises to fight them with all his might, the other is more loyal to the culture of street racing.
All these small and generally unnecessary details for the genre allow you to perceive the environment not just as a decoration, a playpen for entertainment, but as a full-fledged world that lives its own life, regardless of what the player does. Also, the story is not focused on another ambitious racer who wants to be the first, the best and the most successful. Our goal is to restore justice and punish those guilty of injustice. In other words, good old fashioned revenge.
In addition, the game encourages you to think and even consider which races are more profitable to sign up for, given that we may not win, and which are better to sacrifice for the sake of a lower level of Heat. And this directly affects the gameplay.
The game was provided by the publisher in the PS5 version, the optimization is excellent, the game works stably, I did not encounter any critical bugs. The game does not have ray tracing, and in fact it is the biggest flaw of the visual component, because at high speeds it is noticeable how the game does not have time to load the display and this perfectly shows why the industry should switch to new technologies for working with lighting, especially in similar genres.
DualSense works perfectly, gear shifting feels especially cool if you don’t press the trigger fully, depending on the engine power, the recoil of the cock also changes. There is also a standard vibration when driving off-road or during an accident, but this will not surprise anyone.
In conclusion, Need for Speed Unbound is a good arcade race with its flaws, and has every chance to return the series to the top league, the main thing is that the developers and EA do not stop there, but continue to develop the series in the chosen direction. Just add more diverse music and it will be great.
Pros:
interesting physical model, good story for the genre and overall atmosphere and feel of the living world, unique visual style, music in the context of the game
Cons:
the number of cars (only 143) may not be enough for some players, funny bugs, I want more variety of music
Conclusion:
It seems that after a long time in limbo, the series is coming back to life with a new visual style and interesting world-building solutions that you wouldn’t expect from a racing game.
