Need for Speed: Unbound2022

Need for Speed Unbound is a rather lower-level arcade racer and in my opinion a significant step backwards compared to NFS Heat. About the comic graphics and the driving effects can certainly still be argued and at the beginning I found these really disturbing. But I got used to it quite quickly. Much more disruptive is the AI and the general gameplay. After a much too long prologue, which initiates the completely contentless story. Do the same for the next few hours: The game is divided into 4 weeks with a big event on Saturday. From Monday to Friday there is a day and a night session, so a total of 40 sessions in which you feel like you drive one of the two races to earn a little money to get your car ready to participate in the Saturday event. Not only that the entire gameplay loop is absolutely monotonous; No, because the events bring in so little money, you can often only optimize the car performance, because there is often no money left for the optics. You just have too little money to try new cars. For this, the AI is simply absolutely not balanced. Sometimes you win the race for miles and another time an opponent was so much faster that I had to restart some races more often. Absolutely corrosive. Oh and there is the police who are not challenging or similar, but just annoys and costs time. I wasn't even arrested! Without police, I could have easily saved 10 hours. If the optional things after the story are more fun than the story itself, that already says a lot about the game. But the biggest negative point for me is that campaign and online mode are separate from each other. That was the biggest advantage of Heat, that you could drive the races together with the buddies. This is no longer possible in Unbound and has cost me a lot of fun, as the online mode is completely independent. If it had been solved as in Heat, I would certainly have been able to see over the above mentioned Kritk, so Unbound is only an okay game, which is in every respect worse than Heat. Therefore, I can not understand that Unbound has a better metascore than Heat. For $20, you can’t go wrong if you like arcade racers.

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