I picked up NFS Unbound for $10 on a steam sale. The game is made by Criterion and it's their first full fledged racing game in a decade after Ghost Games had taken over for several titles (including a "series reboot"). Criterion are the masters of racing games. I liked the Black Box era of NFS with Hot Pursuit 2, Underground 1, 2, Most Wanted, Pro Street, etc etc. I even liked NFS The Run. NFS Rivals was the first game I got for my PS4. So, despite the series having many flaws I still like the games. Need For Speed is very much a highly polished AAA street racing game, but after Rivals I sorta stopped playing them.

The game has a prolouge that is about an hour long that sets up the characters and their motivation for...racing and stuff. You and a friend fix up a car and go racing, your mechanic friend double crosses you and your garage. 2 years later they turn up again and you have to climb up the ranks to defeat them, with the help of a mysterious benefactor.

But here is where it's very possible to fuck yourself over. I picked a Honda Civic as my starter car. FWD cars are bad because this game depends on drifting to get boosts, go around corners, and do several events. There are whole drifting events that are impossible to do well at because you're in a FWD car. They just handle really badly. After 3 or so hours of struggling I decided to restart the game because you're locked to a starter car, you can't sell it to buy a different one, and you can't earn enough to buy a 2nd more capable car.

So I restarted and in the prologue I made the tactical error of buying a wing for my car after the first race. You need money to enter the next race, and there's no way to earn money, and there's no way to sell parts back to get the money back, so I just softlocked myself in the game's tutorial. I have now sunk like 4 hours into this game and it's been frustrating the entire time, I'm going to have to restart a 3rd time to get past the tutorial.

This was such an easy problem to solve, don't let me spend money in the tutorial on anything but races. but now i'm like going to have to restart the game a 3rd time because the progression system absolutely sucks

Yeah, I basically ran into the same issue. I was still kind of into it for a while, but the more I played, the more I wished it was just a series of races without all this shitty progression system, uninteresting plot, or open world. There's something decent here, but the bloat of being AAA really gets in the way.