ATTENTION: This review will be based on my experience from November 2022. All of the Season content and Team Kaizen content from 2023 and 2024 will not be present.
After the disappointing news of EA shutting down former NFS developer, Ghost Games, they have let Criterion, once again, to work on the next entry in this franchise, along with the help of Codemasters Cheshire, the guys behind Dirt 5, and even older games when they were known as Evolution: Motorstorm, Drive.Club, and Onrush. Pretty talented developers who have all worked on arcade racing games. This got everyone curious to how will the next game will look, but most importantly, how it plays. Well, Need for Speed is back but this time, with an urban twist; focusing more on the Hip-Hop culture with a heavy graffiti artstyle to add to the flavor. We'll talk about the theme of the game more later but I will talk about how impressed I was with this entry. While this game continues to improve some things from the last entry, NFS Heat, there's not enough to make it stand out compared to the last game.
Let's start with the Main Menu first. Just like Heat, you have a two options to play the game, but this time, things are different. You have yourself an offline Story Mode you can venture in (more on that later), and you have the Multiplayer where you can connect with 15 other players to roam around the city and setup a race. Which....alright, let's get the Multiplayer over with.
I've had my issues with how Need for Speed's Multiplayer have worked from the amount of games I've played from from the Criterion and Ghost Games era. Hot Pursuit Remastered was released back in 2020 had a very easy pick up and play Multiplayer once you jump in. You select Quick Play, and you're already in a lobby, either waiting for other players to join, or already ready to start playing. You can still easily find players to this day as it having crossplay makes that game worth picking up. Rivals, Payback, and even Heat doesn't have a Quick Play lobby; you're just in this server with other players driving around and doing nothing. You're trying to interact with them, even as wanting to start a race, but nobody wants to play with you. I don't understand why Unbound still continues to not have a Quick Play option like Hot Pursuit Remastered and NFS 2015 did. It's really annoying for those of us who wanna take care newly tuned cars to the streets. Rant over....
But Multiplayer is a little different from the last entry. Any vehicle you have collected from the Story Mode does not carry to Multiplayer; you have to start with a completely new car and grind your way up to upgrade your cars and even purchase new ones to upgrade them as well. In theory, this works out really well and is a breath of fresh air for some of us who just wanna take a car we like and spend so much time on making it the best it can be, like an RPG! However, the grind can be painfully slow given that once again, you'll have other players in your server who are likely not really interested in races. So you'll have to spend time switching to different servers and setting up races, hoping a few people would jump in. It gets tedious, but once you got a race going with 3-7 other players, it's a very fun experience!
As for how the cars handle, it's unique. At first, I really wasn't enjoying it at first as I did chose the S15 in the Story Mode and it slides so easily, but the game opens up more to where you can fully find your car and I got to understand how to make these vehicles feel just right for me. Starting off, the cars have more weight to them compared to Heat. It's still very arcadey and nowhere near the levels of Forza Horizon, but it really doesn't need to be as this series is mostly an over-the-too arcade racer. Brake to Drift is back but this time, drifting feels a little slower, as it was seen as being too powerful in Multiplayer races from previous games, making pure grip handling useless. Speaking of grip, it handles just as fine as Heat, still gotta use the brakes when cornering, which you can turn B2D completely off. Plus, the new Nitrous Meter in this game rewards grip handling so well compared to drifting. You have Burst Nitrous which gives you an extra boost for meeting requirements like Near Misses, Drifting, Grip, Drafting, and even taking the Cops out. The catch is that you only have a few seconds to use it before it's gone, so you'll have to keep doing the stuff I've mentioned if you want it to stay longer.
Customization in this game is the same as Heat, so I can't talk about it much, but this time, cars are divided into classes that you'll need to participate in specific events that require that specific class. Upgrading your car will increase your Class Meter, the more you upgrade your car, the more your car will be put into the higher classes to face off faster cars. You'll have to keep some of those cars in a low class if you want to participate in lower class events.
As for the Cops, they're still aggressive, but not as aggressive as they were in Heat. You can easily escape them with a Heat 3, but Heat 4 and 5 are when they start to get a bit annoying to avoid as they start spawning near you when you're trying to escape. They're easy take down, but trying to hide from sight will be difficult as helicopters will track you down. Thankfully, I never got busted this game at all, so I will say it's far better than Heat's very aggressive and annoying Cops that are difficult to takedown and deals you a huge chunk of damage.
Now onto the Story Mode. For both Single and Multi, you can create your own character and the story starts off in Lakeshore City, a fictional Chicago, with you and your friend Jasmine fixing up one of the Starter Cars you picked from the beginning from your father figure, Rydell. That's when you'll be racing in events, tournaments, doing side missions from other characters you met from races, and things go smoothly until your friend Jasmine starts to get upset with Rydell for not appreciating the work she done on cars in her way, and then things really gets bad. I won't spoil it, but things turned really south and you'll have to fix the mess. Personally, I enjoy it, but commonly, it still falls under the cheesy storyline NFS has had ever since the first game. You either like or you don't. Everyone plays their character really well except your avatar. I don't know why, but it feels like someone forgot to have your avatar talk before the game was set to be shipped and they sound pretty bland.
The presentation of the game is outstanding, but it clashes with the graffiti-like effects and cell shaded character models. I really wish they would go full throttle on the comic book, graffiti style with the cars and the city itself as it's very cool and makes it stand out over the other racing games in the market. It's a great looking game, running on the Frostbite engine again, but looks 100 times better than the grainy filters of the previous entries.
Overall, this is a solid entry to the series if your new, but to most people who have played a bunch of these games before, this one can feels really samey as it has often been compared to Heat and sometimes nicknamed "Heat 2". You would think with Criterion back on and the merge of Codemaster Cheshire, we would get something completely different, but it feels like another Ghost Games entry. The gameplay is, in my opinion, the best as it's ever been for this series as the handling is a lot more customizable, but the Story Mode is passable, yet forgettable, and some may not enjoy not having to bring their cars from Story to Multi. As for Multiplayer, this knocks points off from me quickly as it's more of the same boring servers from the previous games. I would love a Quick Play feature in this game so I hope they would manage to add one in down the line if they're gonna add more content. With how EA shut Ghost Games down not long after Heat's release, there's no telling what will happen to the folks at Criterion except probably making another Battlefield game with DICE. Only time will tell.