There are a couple of nice mountainside segments with multiple switchbacks for drifting, but overall there’s nothing particularly interesting to look at outside the city. It’s just freeways, backroads, and trees draped over some hills. Unbound’s countryside is also quite typical and unmemorable – which, to be fair, was also a criticism of Heat. Unbound’s new Chicago-inspired Lakeshore map has some nice, grid-like streets and tunnels for its urban racing, but the city itself is actually a bit vanilla compared to Heat’s neon-bathed, Miami-like Palm City. That said, it does make Unbound feel like an evolution of Ghost’s work rather than something Criterion has really put its own stamp on, like it did with its acclaimed 2010 reboot of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, and its take on Need for Speed: Most Wanted from 2012. This isn’t exactly a bad thing – Heat was a very welcome course correction after Payback and I enjoyed it.
Performance Tooningīeneath the snazzy effects, Unbound sticks more closely to Heat’s gameplay format than I’d expected. But I think it would’ve looked better than this blended solution.
Would that have been controversial? Probably. But I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a compromise, accidental or otherwise, that Unbound’s vehicles and world haven’t been given the same treatment – like a modern-day Auto Modellista, or 2020’s Inertial Drift. It isn’t jarring, especially considering that there have been some big improvements with the lighting since Heat and, at its best, Unbound looks like a highly stylised, interactive trailer. However, the juxtaposition between Unbound’s cars (which continue to strive towards photorealism) and its cartoon characters and effects is a peculiar one.
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