...because there are No Limits to how abysmal this NASCAR-themed game is.
NASCAR Unleashed is a 2011 arcade racing game developed by Firebrand Games and published by Activision. In a single sentence, the game has already failed at everything something with the NASCAR title should be. In this abysmal shovelware, you "race" (more on that later) against eleven other drivers in a three- to five-lap circuit race. The game is entirely devoid of soul, passion, or anything - and I do mean anything - that would make this game a worthwhile pick-up, no matter the price. I apologize for the lack of images in this review - I don't currently have a way to capture screenshots on my 3DS, and the homebrew scene hasn't come up with anything for the old 3DS models. Not like the game's worth looking at anyway.
Graphics
Unleashed's graphics are revolutionary! At least, they would be had this game been an Nintendo 64 exclusive released in 1997. It seriously looks as though the graphic designers at Firebrand took a look at an older racing game, said "this looks exceptional!", sipped their tea and forgot about the world's standards in 2011. Hell, this game was being developed while Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto V were being developed, two of the best looking games of that era. It's published by Activision, one of the biggest names in video games even to this day. Grand Theft Auto IV was released three years prior, and Mario Kart 7 was released a month after this game. This game looks antique compared to everything on this list, which is unlike any prior game in the series. This is a game that makes you think the old games are sequels to this, or perhaps it is the most telling notability regarding the change in developers. Even then, the Big Three of NASCAR back in the day all had pretty great graphics, showing that it was not a result of the differing image between companies or the degradation of quality to meet time constraints. No, this game is a pure example of what happens when a company makes a game to make money instead of as a passion. Unleashed is the corporate sellout of video games, and by the clear discontinuation of NASCAR games that went against the formula, it didn't do too well.
Let's talk about the cars. The liveries of each car (all models are identical despite not all drivers driving the same brand) are accurate at a glance, but then you start seeing discrepancies and you can't stop. Colors aren't correct at all, the cars are noticeably shaped entirely correctly (why are the wheels so big??), and the things look and reflect like plastic. Were the only references used the tiny car models they used to sell at Wal-Mart? Was the graphics designer hammered out of his mind? Did Activision even take more than a sideways glance at this game before it hit store shelves? This game amazes me simply because it is multi-platform and has a retail release. Like, how? How did a game of this caliber even make it off the cutting room floor, much less into people's hands?
Oh, and, for some reason, the game includes each driver's signature. What creep thought that would be a good idea? It isn't even placed particularly well, and it serves absolutely no functionality whatsoever. Notably, only Kevin Harvick's signature is absent (as far as I can tell). Is his budget too low to try to forge his signature, or something? Because I really can't tell what the purpose of that would be otherwise. It's not a nice touch, because they're all pixelated messes and entirely out of place. Again, who thought this was a good idea?
Gameplay
Was this game intended to be played by anyone with eyes, ears, and the ability to formulate opinions of their own? It sure doesn't seem like it.
Maybe, maybe, you could tolerate the outdated and lazy graphics. Maybe you could tolerate the vehicles being so terribly strange. Maybe you could cope with the mediocre, bland soundtrack, perhaps playing your own music instead. I could even understand being fine with the fact that it's a kart racer. Oh, did I mention it was a kart racer? Imagine this: your favorite live sport on TV, often characterized with simulation racing games and handled by developers who know what the hell they're doing, gets a 3DS release. Let's say you take your shiny new 3DS into consideration while shopping and come across this game on store shelves to fill the void before Mario Kart 7 comes out. You're excited. A NASCAR game, on a handheld!! You pop in the game, hoping for something at least reminiscent of the Thunder games. You ideally want a fun, replayable sim racer that you can play on the train or in the back of a car on a long road trip. Now imagine your disappointment as a game comes to meet none of those standards, and plays like a Facebook Marketplace Mario Kart. Imagine your rage as NASCAR Unleashed fails each and every expectation you set out for it. Imagine your rage when you see yet another example in the long decline of NASCAR video games. Imagine your rage as you pop the cart in and see that you wasted money - real, hard-earned cash - on something that only exists due to the negligence of its creators and the ignorance of its primary demographic. Now, let me instill upon you a vicarious hatred of this foul game, to spread and ease my suffering. If you're this far into the review, you're probably suffering too.
Loading up the game first time will present you with two rather uncomfortably long loads disguised as save screens. Or maybe it really was saving data, which doesn't make much sense considering there was no data to save. On the topic of no data, you'll quickly realize that this game is extremely barebones. The primary """career""" mode of the game, entitled "Championship," takes you through a short series of tracks not so dissimilar to Mario Kart. There are three pages of around six races each, with each page saying it is a certain difficulty: rookie, pro, or legend. It seems to want to imitate the legendary games that stood before it by using some of the same terminology throughout the game. How cute. You also get a Time Trials mode and a few other menus to make the main screen look like it has content. There are little achievements you can earn on all versions of the game, attempting like many others do to at least give someone a reason to play this game. On the 3DS version, you have a dedicated menu in-game to look at your meager achievements, all of which take little to no effort to obtain. One could say that this is simply a demake of the game found on more powerful consoles, and I'd wholeheartedly believe them. There is significantly less game to play here than what is present on any other version of the game. During the older EA days of NASCAR, we got mostly the same game across each version. Maybe there was an exclusive here and there, but even if the platform was less powerful, it still received a fair bit of love from the developers. Here, there is no love. There is no passion. There is no soul. There is nothing more than a cheap clone of Mario Kart and a whole lot of disappointment.
Loading (emphasis on loading, there are far too many loading screens to be considered healthy) into your first race will shock you. "The game! How could it be so horribly ugly?!?" Unleashed tries to take a realistic look, as is typical of NASCAR games, but then proceeds to fail spectacularly at it. Not only does it fail on the realism (or, well, graphics as a whole) front entirely, once you'll start driving, you'll notice the steering is off. The cars react too well, the bumps don't hurt, and how are we accelerating to 190 in a quarter lap on Daytona Motor Speedway? Here's the answer: the game is an arcade kart racer, the exact opposite of what the game's name and licensing implies. If the people wanted NASCAR to be represented the same as go-karting, then we'd have nationally televised go-karting instead of stock car racing. The people want stock car racing, not poorly-disguised go-karts slamming into each other at breakneck speeds. I was hitting speeds I only would on Thunder 03's Tiburon track on the TURNS of Daytona, which are strangely tight in this game. Oval tracks as a whole seem to be strangely absent, with the game preferring to show off its original "road courses". As a semi-unrelated fact, driving off-road doesn't reduce your speed whatsoever (as far as I could tell, anyway).
The AI just stinks. The rubber-banding is some of the most egregious I've ever seen in a game. When you're in dead last, everything in front of you seems to take a 50% cut to their top speed for no reason whatsoever. Like, did everyone just wreck out seemingly out of nowhere? Is there a hidden caution flag to let Mr. Main Character catch up? As the nail in the coffin, not only do the AI take horrid lines and wreck into you at every possible moment, their rubber banding doesn't allow them to catch up to you if you drive cleanly. If there was a ranking of the worst driver AI in a game, first place would go to Grand Theft Auto V, second to Big Rigs, and third to this pile of junk. This game is so abhorrent, it can't place first in any category - even 'worst racing game'. To win a race, all you have to do is ignore the game's persistent insistence to commit heinous acts of violence against the eleven celebrities that happen to be moving at similar speeds near you. The game seems to really want you to win, all the time. The "challenges" are incredibly simple, making advancing throughout what little game there is here rather easy. There is no challenge whatsoever in this game, especially if you've played any other racing game ever. The game attempts to include some artificial difficulty by encouraging drifting as a mechanic, even though any successful attempt to perform this difficult trick is significantly slower than racing like a normal person would.
The game also includes, as mentioned, a very heavy emphasis on collisions. You earn points during a race by colliding with others, which - similar to the Thunder Plates of the past - unlock various cosmetics and "cheats" (game decorations, mainly). If you wreck into others to earn those points, however, the game punishes you by having them become unnaturally aggressive towards you via the Rivals system. These rivalries only last for a single race - seemingly alluding to Firebrand's suspicion that all NASCAR drivers have memory loss - and are significantly more aggressive than anything we've seen in the series thus far. To further encourage the system's use, you always start in dead last - no matter how successful the prior race was for you. You get no opportunity to qualify for races, which goes directly against the NASCAR formula. Did the developers not know that they existed, and just thought they took a pause to let commercials pass? The large amount of brand names used in the game seem to suggest so. Or, perhaps, they knew their AIs were complete rubbish, and were looking for more things to make the game at least partially challenging to maybe a toddler. It seems they didn't do their market research well - toddlers these days are up and coming Chess Grandmasters, engineers, or don't know how to operate a controller. Maybe the challenge Firebrand intended was to get the system working, and the copy of NASCAR Unleashed in the back of the device would merely be a coincidence. In no world would this game be a reward - at most, a minor inconvenience, and that's me being nice.
And as the cherry on the cake, the game crashed on me twice during regular gameplay. Beautiful.
Conclusion
Nobody who had a part to play in making and producing this game has ever sat down and played it. I refuse to believe even the most curious of QA testers ever touched this game. If they had, there would be evidence - evidence in the form of the game not being as utterly terrible as it is. I believe there is a reason that Firebrand Games hasn't made anything since 2020 - a very, very good reason.
Green Light (The GOOD):
- Might be cheap (but not worth the pain)
- Finally! A game that can match the quality of FOX's race footage!
- Could be fun if you ignore literally everything - hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, eh?
- It appears to be a mostly finished game, unlike something like Big Rigs
- It (probably) can't (won't?) hurt you (and/or others in your vicinity). Hopefully.
Red Light (The BAD):
- Loads longer than it takes to find another game on eBay
- Uglier than the PS1 NASCAR games
- No challenge whatsoever unless the game decides it doesn't like you
- Godawful AI
- Clear case of using a license to make a shovelware game, as is the stigma nowadays
- Bland, boring soundtrack
- Creep employee decided to include the driver's signatures as graphics
- No replayability, incredibly short (it took longer to write this review than it took to beat the game)
- By far one of - if not THE - worst game to ever use the NASCAR licensing.
You're a beautiful person. In the end, no matter what others say, you can go and do as you wish in the world. But you deserve so, so much better, sweetheart. You need something better than this in your life. Find a game that will take care of you. Find a game that can help you get through the lowest of lows and be present during the highest of highs. You need better than this. Treat yourself better than NASCAR Unleashed ever could. It may not be able to hurt you, but you'll leave as though it had broken your heart and your skull, broken into your home and stolen your valuables, and left key marks on the passenger door of your car. But, if you have it, you shouldn't traumatize others with it. Give it the E.T. treatment and bury it deep in a landfill somewhere and save somebody's day when you can. Take care of yourself.