I was skeptical as always, but this time I was proven wrong. If you leave aside the artificial, gaudy comic art, Criterion has finally managed not to create what feels like the tenth rehash of a Forza Burnout Need for Speed Paradise Horizon. Well, a few obligatory destruction orgies are on board again and you have a déjà vu every now and then, but it is kept within limits. And if it might seem too copied, you paste colorful comic-book smoke and wings on it. It sounds dumb, and actually it is, but the tolerance level for the borderline Marvel-verse drops with every virtual kilometer driven. And that’s exactly why I’m somewhat at peace with myself and NFS again. You’ll read more about how this works in detail in a moment. But I’m actually kind of excited this time (you can definitely tell). Of course, with minor drawbacks, but the positives clearly outweigh the negatives this time.
Now let’s get to the game. Need for Speed Unbound is a distinct arcade racer and offers a lot of fun and quite pretty graphics. The game is out for Windows, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles, but I’m only interested in the PC version today. I still wanted to mention the other platforms, because crossplay is also on board. The latest edition of the Need for Speed (NFS) racing game series was once again developed by Criterion Games and is, oh wonder, based on DICE’s Frostbite engine. This is actually rather a difficult diva to handle (Battlefield, Fifa, Madden and the like) but for the end user rather light fare in terms of the necessary hardware. The real stress takes place in the studio. The game has been given the usual image accelerators like DLSS 3 and FSR 2.2, including NVIDIA’s Frame Generation (RTX 4000 provided).
I was also able to find surprisingly few errors, even the clipping worked surprisingly safely in case you did get stuck. Actually, I always got out. From that point of view, the game made a pleasantly finished impression, which unfortunately wasn’t always true for the servers. At certain times it was almost impossible to connect, so then only the story remained, whose plot definitely doesn’t deserve a Nobel Prize for literature and whose cinematic realization in the cut-scenes shouldn’t be reaching for the Oscar either. But even solid home cooking is something of a distinction in this day and age, and at some point the servers started running again. I was satisfied and my time went quickly.
Important storyline: Lakeshore as an open world
At the start is everything you’ve seen in an NFS at some point, except for real race tracks and icy mountain roads perhaps. A densely built-up inner city, a large harbor area, pretty curvy mountain regions, various parks, freeways and commercial areas with lots of potential for destruction. Sometimes you also feel like you’re in Test Drive Unlimited 2, only prettier. Speaking of GTA feeling: some things look like the never finished Chicago map for GTA V. This makes you forget the dusty Palm City from NFS Heat. Day and night changes are static and depend on the progress of the game. The weather changes only between sun and rain when entering during the day, with the streets always looking wet and puddles to demonstrate the graphic pep. At night, everything seems a touch more humid and clearly more colorful. At least something.
The most important “innovation” is the non-existent rubber-band AI, which has been bugging us since the first NFS Most Wanted. If you’re good on circuits, you’ll end up seeing the tail lights of cars that have long since been overtaken with a little skill. Thanks for that. Resetting in case of driving errors or crashes is quick and you certainly lose time, but you can quickly catch up again and still stay ahead, depending on your skills. Thanks for that too, it was long overdue. Speaking of AI: the police are quite intrusive, but still very manageable up to level 2. After that, you’d better find a place to hide and with any luck just sit out the manhunt. Known how and where.
By the way, you unlock garages (or hiding places) via missions in the story. Unfortunately, you won’t find any free races in the open world (except for a few exercises). So you often have to go to the respective meeting points in a rather time-consuming way if you want to start races. After the race, however, you stand where the race ended and the journey to the meeting point starts all over again if there was a second race there. This is quite annoying, because fast travel unfortunately does not exist. At least you can then bag various collectibles (street art, bonus bears) or let the hammer hang out and complete various activities (drift parkour, speed cameras, jumps and billboards) on the return trips
There is no real damage model, but hey, it is an arcade racer. The NPCs scurrying around in the form of countless pedestrians are faster than us before impact and there will be no human puddle going. Well, it often looks like ragdoll ballet with an ecstasy background, but at least it passes for USK6 and stays vegan.
Errors and opportunities for improvement
That there is no savegame management is completely incomprehensible. You can find the folder with the game state under “Documets” (My Documents) and you can also save your current game state by simply copying it over (this also works while the program is running). Criterion has unfortunately completely forgotten about management, so if you want to start a new career, for example, you have to manually delete the old savegame before starting the game. If you want to play with different profiles or progress, you unfortunately have the complete zonk here. Please improve! If I find time and leisure and the game still feels good after a few days, I might write an external savegame management. Depending.
What is also flawed is the lack of remembering the camera perspective selected in each case. You basically always start sitting on the front bumper, which is really annoying. The dialogs are good in places, sometimes silly, especially since certain things are sometimes repeated in very short succession or don’t really fit the racing action. But let’s forget that, you can nonchalantly ignore that, even if the German speakers are only below average. Which, again, is nothing new. As if we don’t have character voices in DE, everything sounds sterilely chipped through, i.e. like a kind of deep voice fake without any emotion.
In some races, the start faltered a bit and I had considerable frame drops in the first meters even with a GeForce RTX 4090. A workaround is to clear the shader cache, at least with NVIDIA cards. The cache is deleted from “DocumentsNeed For Speed(TM) Unboundcache” as well as from the folder “NFS Foldershadercache”, optionally also the profile options under “DocumentsNeed For Speed(TM) Unboundsettings”. The next time I started the game, it effectively fixed itself and the drops were gone again.
Otherwise, the game runs surprisingly smooth for an unpatched first version, kudos.
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