izigame.me

There's not a whole lot of content in this game, and so to compensate, everything is designed to waste your time.
1. When you reach heat level 5 (which happens often), the cops are ruthless. Which wouldn't be so bad, except they cheat their butts off. Unless you have an extremely fast car (which you won't, in early to mid game), the cops will be able to keep up with you no matter what. Meanwhile, choppers stay on you and keep you in constant alert status. If you try to destroy the cop vehicles (which isn't always the easiest thing), more will show up before you whittle them down to 0. Sometimes cops will pop out of thin air right in front of you - not even kidding - straight up teleporting into existence. If you do manage to escape them and enter cooldown, no matter where you hide they will have a search party that magically knows where you are by sending choppers and vehicles in your direction from all sides. Unless you have an easy exit, they will intercept you and start the whole process over again. Cops will often be on you by default when you exit certain races, so there's no avoiding it. And if you do get caught (or you give up), you lose whatever sum of money you worked up in the current session. So much of this game is running from cops when all you want to do is get to your next race. It's already grindy enough - why add insult to injury?
2. For a game called "Need for Speed: Unbound", you spend so much of the early game messing around in slow vehicles that can barely finish a race. This is also by far the most restrictive NFS title to date - what exactly about it screams "unbound"? I understand not giving players the fastest cars right off the bat, but this really is swinging the pendulum too far the other direction.
3. The AI is cheap. There will be races where someone will do a hard 90 right in front of you even though you're both on a straight path. There's literally no reason why any racer would do this ever other than to sabotage you. If you slam into the AI cars, not much happens. But if they slam into you, you go spiraling like crazy. Rubberbanding is also an issue, where you could be absolutely cruising in 1st place and then suddenly the 2nd place person comes rocketing forth ahead of you at speeds that shouldn't be possible. Sometimes the 1st place racer will be a superhuman driver you can never catch up to even on Relaxed mode. Then you restart the race a few times and suddenly it's way easier even though you're driving no differently. Winning races doesn't feel like you're doing anything skillful - it just feels like the AI decided to ease off the BS pedal.
4. Fast travel was present in the other NFS titles for the most part. But here, it's been removed completely. No good reason for this other than inflating play time.
5. There are only a couple racetracks in the entire game, and so you'll be running the same stuff again and again and again.
6. The story is poorly written. Your "manager" Tess is not a very likable or trustworthy character, and nobody in-game likes her either. I'm unsure why the devs intentionally put someone in such a prominent role that they knowingly proclaim as insufferable and self-absorbed. Our protagonist even asks her at one point, "Do you even care about my wellbeing? Like, at all?" Also, the big incident in the prologue could have been resolved by a simple conversation. Instead, characters run off without explanation, leading to years of misunderstandings instead. The whole thing falls flat for me.
7. The car handling in this game is among the worst. I'm no racing game expert, but I was still able to beat NFS 2015's Prestige Mode with all golds, so it's not like I outright suck -- and yet I had trouble driving in this game. Things are either super resistant to turning or they slide off the road like butter. While you can upgrade your parts and mess with the tuning, it takes a lot of money and effort to make your driving experience even remotely enjoyable.
8. The visual style is a lot more "cartoony" and quite different compared to the other NFS titles. Some like it, some hate it. Personally I'm not a fan, but I stopped noticing it eventually.
9. The whole game is shoehorned into an awkward 4-week system where you need to keep cars confined to specific tiers in order to progress. It's odd and confusing. In the end, it feels like just another way to force you to spend more time grinding for cars and upgrades, which means more time spent racing, which means more time running away from cops...
10. Game crashes for no good reason from time to time.
I really struggle to find the positive in this game. It feels rushed, lazy, and stretched out to compensate for a lack of real content. To charge $70 for this is offensive. IMO, this is deep sale material.