Game Review: Need for Speed Unbound – PS5
Burnout: Underground
Hello, dear readers and gamers! Last week, EA and Criterion Games unleashed upon the world Need for Speed Unbound, the latest racing title in this beloved franchise. I remember with nostalgia the good old days when I was playing Need for Speed 2 SE, Porsche, Underground, and later the excellent Most Wanted.
So, to make it easy for you, I was playing NFS in 1997, a long, long time ago, right? 25 years? Wow, that really makes me feel old!
This will be a relatively short review because Unbound should be familiar to all NFS fans. The game adds some new touches – like a new restart mechanic that limits the number of retries anyone gets on a daily basis, separate Solo and Online campaigns, and over 100 cars, but sadly fails miserably at accessibility. So, without further ado, let’s get on the road.
Criterion Games has delivered with Need for Speed Unbound the best NFS in the last 10 years! Building on the fantastic Burnout Paradise, NFS Most Wanted and the already classic NFS Underground, this year’s Unbound is a pure joy to play.
From the superb graphics that fill the screen with colorful graffiti and cell-shaded characters to the realistic look of the cars and environments, the superb gameplay, exotic cars, illegal races, or the story reminiscent of Fast and Furious and all the way to the more than decent voice acting, screaming engines, squealing, brakes, the sound of burning rubber and booming soundtrack, Need for Speed Unbound does not disappoint.
The handling feels great, the DualSense controller adds another level of immersion, a new dimension to our senses, making you notice every bump in the road, impact, and the wonderful NOS boost. The world is big, filled with races, events, things to break and collectibles to find.
On PS5 the game wizzes around effortlessly at 60 FPS in 4k. Just like Underground, NFS Unbound puts a lot of accent on customization, the underground culture, and tuning all sorts of cars in your garage. And just like Most Wanted after that, we have a lot of Police in the game that will not give up easily. They will do their best to bust you and to stop any illegal meeting.
As the tagline says, start at the bottom, race to the top, do it against time, try to outsmart the cops, and take on all the weekly qualifiers to reach The Grand, Lakeshore’s ultimate street racing challenge. Lakeshore is alive with activities, pedestrians, billboards to smash, corners to drift around, difficult jumps to master, and street kings to take down on your road to glory.
Now, everything seems nice and smooth, right? Yes, it definitely is for the sighted and the gamers who are not impaired. But for me the broken state in which I found the accessibility features of NFS Unbound was a huge disappointment.
I love Need for Speed, I think that Burnout Paradise is the best and most fun racing game out there, but the people who handled accessibility for this game should not be paid until they fix such a poor and unfinished job. I invite you to check out the video that I embedded below to find out for yourself what I’m talking about. Before the release of NFS Unbound EA advertised menu narration and this is, in my humble opinion, a way to mislead the potential buyer.
Blind gamers can’t wait to try out new games in the hope that some of them would be accessible. The first thing we check is to see if we can navigate the menus. Well, although NFS Unbound seems to include this feature, if we search the web, the menu narration is useless and ends up frustrating, disappointing, and showing the blind community of gamers that the people at EA don’t understand the first thing about blind accessibility.
Even worse is the fact that this is not an isolated and misfortunate incident. Just a couple of months ago I raised awareness about the same thing happening in FIFA 23 and other titles from EA.
Blind people want to play games! We don’t want to be lied to by publishers or developers. I always have the utmost respect for the hardworking and talented people in the gaming industry, but I’d appreciate being treated the same.
If you advertise a feature, make damn sure you deliver it and that it works as it should. Don’t ship half-baked products. Don’t put it there just to tick a box. It is rude, bad form, disrespectful and hurtful.
As a conclusion, Need for Speed Unbound is a fantastic game, the return to the form of a classic franchise, but it fails to deliver an accessible experience to low vision and blind gamers.
I am here to help anyone who wants to make accessibility a priority in their projects, just reach out and we can make sure nothing like this, like what happened with the menu narration in NFS Unbound, happens again.
Review copy provided by EA
Victor Dima
