Need for Speed™ Unbound Reviews

Need for Speed Unbound brings a fresh, vibrant take to the street racing genre with its unique art style blending realistic graphics and stylized graffiti-inspired visuals. The open-world city feels alive, packed with diverse races, events, and hidden secrets to discover. The driving mechanics strike a nice balance between arcade fun and a bit of realism, offering tight controls and thrilling high-speed chases. Customization options are extensive, letting you personalize your cars with a huge variety of visual and performance upgrades. The story is straightforward but enjoyable, and the soundtrack perfectly complements the game’s energetic vibe. While the game shines in single-player mode, the multiplayer experience still feels a bit bare-bones and could use more content.

After i reinstalled the game , all the data including online data got erased

Unbound is the most beautiful or maybe the second most beautiful NFS game ever made, maybe only behind NFS 2015, even if you don't like the driving effects or the cel-shading characters, it's still something artistically impressive and this game exudes style, however, i feel that in this case, Unbound exudes style without any substance. I feel that they changed the handling considerably from Heat/Payback which was a handling style that was being perfected over the years with Ghost games and dare i say they had reached perfection with Heat's handling, that's one of the reasons that people love that game so much even though it also has flaws, they had no excuse or reason to change the handling style for Unbound, but i don't blame criterion for this, i blame EA for shutting Ghost games just after they finally hitting big on a NFS game with heat, that's literally ignoring the wishes and the feedback of players, and was extremely unfair to that studio. Some people criticized and made fun of Payback for not having free-roam cops, guess what, they ruin Unbound completely, you won't struggle at all to find several negative reviews saying how cops ruin Unbound, and it's no exagerattion, you spend 70% of the playtime running away from cops, either on free-roam or in the middle of races, it's tiring and frustrating, the rewards for escaping a chase are almost non-existent so it just feels like a waste of time, the game has too much cops, they spawn on all sides, there's helicopters to dodge, you're most of the time stressing about dodging the cops and hiding in a way that just pads gameplay in a slow way, it's literally faster to quit out of the game and open it again if you start a chase than spend your time on a cop chase, EVEN on easy difficulty. Opponent racers AI is also terrible, i don't even know why there's difficulty options in this game, all of them rubber-band severely right behind your car even with max specs for your car class and even on the easier difficulties. Progression is slow, story is almost non-existent, with idk, 5 cutscenes the entire game? Everything is so expensive, and there's little to no reason to participate in low-paying races instead of focusing on the ones that pay a lot, i feel like all races in this game should pay 2x to 3x more money. I don't play much multiplayer but for some reason the game won't fill empty slots in a race with AI racers, making it possible to end up playing a race by yourself on multiplayer with literally no opponents which is stupid. There was also no shortage of strange performance behavior, like micro-stuttering for no reason on a PC above recommended specs and with just the game and dc open. Or the game crashing when you alt-tab out of it. I really would like to say that Unbound is a fun game that deserves your time as it's such a beautiful game, but i can't, i recommend that you play literally all of the NFS titles available on Steam before playing Unbound, and even if you played other titles, i would recommend just playing Forza or literally any other racing games instead of spending your money and time on Unbound.

Racing and chasing are terrible due to dumb AI of both racers and cops. This game does not offer much content and feels repetitive. The selection of cartoon effects is disappointingly poor, most of them are just color variations. The dialogues are so annoying I had to mute them. Some mechanics are pointless, for example the week system. Extremely boring story. In some places unbreakable walls feel unnecessarily restrictive. There are some cool new features, like people walking on the streets, but not game changing. In short, one of the worst NFS games ever.

I have to be honest, I went in fully expecting to hate this game, but it kinda works for me. PROS: First off, the gameplay is solid. Handling is LEAGUES better than it has been for the last 10 years, without the feeling of being stuck in glue from the self titled game (2015), and the slider for grip - drift actually making a difference. A bit of a learning curve, but a welcome one. I also love that the game works off a calendar system where you have 4 weeks to win. It kinda feels like a looming, overhanging threat and puts some pressure on you. A welcome change in my eyes. Car selection is... decent. I would like to see more variety instead of having 20 cars that are slightly interesting and half of them being a convertible version. I would never go for a convertible in these games, because it honestly doesn't make sense. This isn't Hot Pursuit high speed cruising on the coast of Miami, this is underground illegal street racing. Customization is really good as it has been for a while now, ya'll know the drill at this point. Docking a few points since they STILL haven't fixed the broken liveries. Also the art style is pretty god damn cool, like how are people annoyed by it. It's so customizable and adds some pretty sick visuals to the regular racing. If you don't like it then just turn it off, pretty simple to do so. Writing. I actually like how they act in this game, Sure, it's cringe at times when they're clearly trying to hard (especially in the beginning of the game), but overall it's nothing like the over the top cringeworthy garbage we've seen previously. Like seriously, 2015 was SO MUCH WORSE than this. Newsflash: NFS been cheesy since MW 2005, just take off your nostalgia-goggles for once. I REFUSE to believe ya'll mfers didn't chuckle at the "Weeb in need" mission splash screen, have some fun for once. Now for the cons: EA. I don't have to say anything else, the EA app sucks and we all know it. Soundtrack. Boring, lame, uninspiring slop. You're better off just muting it and playing your own music. Battle pass, this shit sucks and it contains rewards that should be a regular update. Who wants to pay for a body kit for a car that's FEATURED IN THE PICTURES FOR THE MAIN GAME. A car that also needs to be unlocked through the same pass. Yuck, no thanks. The buy in for the races is stupid and just adds unnecessary math to the game. I don't want to sit in the garage calculating which races to do to avoid heat while trying to make the most money possible, I get that they wanna control the pace for the game, but all it does is make the later weeks feel like the payout doesn't matter because you paid 15k just for the start. Makes sense in the beginning, completely unnecessary after week 1. Finally, this game just isn't worth 60$+, like at all. Luckily it's on really good sales like every month, so grab it when it is 5 bucks or so. Honestly just great fun to play, as long as you're not stuck in the past. It's never coming back, so just get over it. TL;DR: Fun game, decent writing, fuck the soundtrack, and fuck EA. They finally made the handling usable, the car selection is pretty fun, especially the lower class cars. Just engine swap a mk1 golf or something idk. Buy it on sale, don't give EA the money they want.

Fun game.. taking your car up the Ski Jump is a lot of fun.. I just wish they would have integrated the police career into the free roam.. you can only upgrade your cop car with police only races - the game would be a lot more fun if you could chase down other players as a police officer.

Good - Graphics Bad - Gameplay Bad - Multiplayer (Nobody plays online) Boring - YES Overall 4.01 / 10

honestly going into this game I didn't have high hopes, just the ratings we see here on steam made it obvious to me that this was gonna be a pretty okay/mid need for speed game. now, I'm not sure if its because I'm playing in 2025 meaning they fixed things but, THIS IS A BANGER???, I've been playing it consistently for 11 hours now getting through the campaign mode and its supremely fun to play! the graphics and style of the game are spectacular, if not the best the need for speed series has ever seen, the music isn't my style but its perfect for the tone of the game. the story is sort of shallow so far yes but, its a story and that's rare enough as is in a racing game, the driving feels fun and intuitive, drifting is great and feels satisfying. the cops are actually fun and challenging, having 3+ heat at night with 30k money at risk feels horrifying. the amount of time it takes to build up money makes buying cars a rare and fun event. and also helps you stick to a car and refine and upgrade it. i don't really know what to say other than this is a really fun game, I honestly would recommend this to anyone willing to try. solid 8.5/10 experience

only good if you get it on a huge sale like me, i would never buy this game for 60 dollars, its kinda trash. BUT if you get it for 5 dollars like me then its an okay deal, still bad but good to play if i'm bored or just want to chill.

>Turn off music >Turn off dialogue >Turn off subtitles The game becomes perfect (No, really. Whoever chose the music and wrote the dialogues for this game I hope they sent you to the sun in a paperbox full of roaches.)