When your tyres scrabble for grip on Lakeshore’s tarmac, a cloud of cartoon smoke bubbles up around them like escaping vapour from an anime just beneath the game’s surface. Need For Speed Unbound takes the series to a place it’s never been before, not visually at any rate – somewhere brighter and sillier than reality, where the tenets of tuner culture spill out from beyond the vinyls and spoilers, like the cars are being scribbled over, before your eyes, at 140mph.
For a series this longstanding and famously formulaic, it’s quite a statement. It has no right to work as well as it does, thisavatars dressed in Fila hoodies, and photorealistic car models on rainy streets. But somehow Criterion, back at the helm of the series for the first time since 2012’s