Need for Speed goes Anime style | Need for Speed: Unbound - Review

Need for Speed is back, and it's back in style. Its newest game, Need for Speed: Unbound takes us to Lakeshore City. Here, street racing, drifting, and NOS usage reign supreme, in which the local cops are actively trying to stop.

The unnamed protagonist of the singleplayer campaign is a newcomer just as we are — the players, along with him are two supporting characters in Jasmine and Rydell, all eager to make a name for themselves. It all changes when the story switches gear from a kid in a new town to a cliche revenge story, serving as the main driver of the plot and an excuse for you to race around and climb to the top. It feels very much like Fast and Furious and I like it. Even the dialogue and all the radio banter from the police and other characters while racing.

The gameplay is just a traditional arcade racer with an arcade style control and drifting. There is nothing really special to it. Need for Speed: Unbound features a collection of over 140 cars that you can collect and customize using your hard earned cash. The race types in the game are pretty standard for the genre, with sprint races, drift challenges, street circuits, etc. There are also cop chases determined by your heat or “wanted” level and the cops patrol the streets across both day and night cycles.

Need for Speed: Unbound also gives us a wide range of accessibility settings when it comes to vehicle control and handling to better improve the gameplay to our personal preferences. Options such as traction control, steering sensitivity, downforce, and grip are entirely tunable. Additional accessibility settings also include customization of what's called “Driving Effects”, which is a new addition to the series and in my knowledge, the genre as a whole.

Driving Effects are the beautifully well crafted anime / graffiti style effects that come out of the car — or transform it completely — that adds visual flavor and personality to the gameplay. Drifting effects, tire smokes, nitrous oxide boosts, flying car stunts, collisions, and many more in-game effects are made alive and kicking with this new addition.

The art style induced by this new creative direction is a bit jarring, the realistic models and lighting of the environment and the vehicles doesn't quite jibe in nicely with the cell shaded textures as well as the anime style character models. I feel that the developers weren’t quite ready yet to fully switch to this cell shaded aesthetic. This resulted into a weird middle ground between photorealism and cell shaded art style. Kind of left at an uncanny valley. if you find it a bit disorienting, you can still turn off the effects or at least turn it down, but the cel shaded nature of some aspects like pedestrians or the characters are entirely permanent.

There is an entirely separate multiplayer mode in Need for Speed: Unbound, with its own online character, progression, gameplay, and activities to do. In online free roam, which is only set in the day, there are the usual activities like events, playlists, speedruns, speed traps, drift zones, jumps, and collectibles to do, As well as hanging out with other players roaming in the city.

I find it unfortunate and disappointing that they weren’t able to mix the two game modes and somehow share progression. On the bright side, you can entirely skip the campaign altogether and jump straight into multiplayer mode with your own character, especially if you are playing with friends.

To sum it up, Need for Speed: Unbound is a much appreciated rejuvenation for the Need for Speed series. Giving it a new paint job and a memorable personality to boot. It still plays like the old Need for Speed games, but now made fresh by its new art direction. The complete separation of multiplayer and singleplayer modes is a huge let down, but you can just look at it as having two different games rolled into one package.