


Need for Speed Unbound has customization options from mechanical heaven, plenty of engine tuning options, and a lovely sense of weight to the cars (until you try and drift). I bounce, reset, and probably catch up enough to finish in a decent position, collect my winnings, and bail - the consequence seems minimal.Īdd in destruction? Well, I think you are a winner. I'll be blazing to first place in NFS Unbound with no problem, but every time I crash or make a mistake, literally nothing happens. Whereas a sim racer can tone down the destruction because you'll be penalized with track time for a crash, the looser parameters of enjoyment you can get out of an arcade racer need something a bit more (for me at least). It's really unfortunate because it strips Need for Speed Unbound of that perfect action-consequence dynamic from Burnout. Burnout managed it by making analog real-world vehicles, but Need for Speed Unbound won't ever get that luxury. No real-world car manufacturer wants to show their vehicles in a state that would indicate it had been street racing and ran through several billboards, resulting in total devastation of all of its road-legal safety features. Why no destruction feature? Probably licensing agreements. It all feels heavily sanitized and plain. They bobble like a Hotwheels car jumping out of the track spick and span. Your low-ride Aston Martin DB5 with a hot pink decal trim and wheels bigger than moons will remain intact if you plow into a tree at 183 miles an hour. In Criterion's latest game, however, destruction is pretty much absent. Criterion nailed it and even brought some of it to Need for Speed Most Wanted years later. What you do on the streets with your off-brand car has a real consequence. It's a visual acknowledgment that your cars aren't toys: they are destructible and combustible. Heck, there is a legendary Crash mode that involves causing as much destruction as possible.
