The smell of old gasoline and rubber. The echo of your footsteps reverberating off the concrete floor and steel walls. The metallic clicking of the engine cooling off after a cruise in the hot summer sun.
These are the things gearheads think about when they look at a really nice car, whether it's theirs or someone else's. What a gearhead feels when they think about those things is a bit different; the smell of old gasoline and rubber is the nostalgia of an old muscle car kept in a barn and sat for years. The metal contracting as it cools off is the freedom that comes from a long trek piloted by a single individual, an accomplishment of human ingenuity and raw physics - science you can see.
Driving a car can be a pleasant, relieving and/or freeing experience.
Driving a car fast, on the other hand, can be visceral. It can be exciting, make the hair on the back of your neck stand straight up, make you sweat harder than a good workout. Racing games have a tough job trying to emulate that exhiliration, the sense of speed one has in a fast car. Need for Speed Unbound does this part extremely well.
It's all about the atmosphere. The sound these cars make can be optionally aided with wacky Hollywood-style sounds to enhance the sense of the car being a pile of extremely complex mechanical parts all clicking into place as you shift into the next gear. Light trails from your tail lights and contrails from your rear wing trace your path through the city, giving the car an extra sense of nimble mobility.
Unbound goes all-in with the Extra Touches. On their own, light trails and Fast And Furious click-clacking won't make you feel truly connected to the car. In tandem with a well-founded atmosphere, however, it can suck you into a world beyond reality.
Ever since NFS: Underground, the main focus of most NFS games have been customization. Letting the player make the car their own in a world of fast imports or dazzling slabs can go a long way to get the player to care about the digital ones and zeroes they're controlling with a couple analog sticks and some buttons. Unbound nails this aspect with quality-of-life improvements to their livery editor, more customization options for cars, and trendy bodykits that feel new and exciting. You can even remove bumpers if you want, exposing the metal chassis and huge cooling radiator to the sunlight.

Over the past couple years, NFS felt like it had lost connection with the passion behind building a car. Sure, they knew what a cool car looked like, but they didn't seem to understand why that car looked cool. It takes creative vision, working within limitations, and busting through those limitations every once in a while to build something truly awesome. A$AP Rocky being brought into the game, I think, wasn't a random namedrop for publicity. It comes through in everything Rocky says in the game.
The Plague was supposed to make Unbound into a passionless throwaway, a game the developers grew tired of developing in a hellish landscape of miscommunication, chaos and fear. That didn't happen. In fact, I think Rocky's presence bolstered the devs and allowed them to find their passion for racing games again. My guess isn't unfounded, either; throughout the game, Rocky's quotes could all very easily be put on one of those Inspirational Posters. You know the ones, with the thick black borders and text in serif font below a pretty image of a colourful landscape. The dude spouts out this "i believe in you, i like your style!" stuff basically the entire game.
During an escort mission where you drive his black and white Benz 190E, he goes off on a huge tirade about passion, creativity, and what the act of creating means to him. He talks about this passionately and off-the-cuff. It's not scripted at all, and you can definitely tell. There are moments where the player character replies to Rocky as if a conversation is happening here, but Rocky's dialogue is actually snippets from Rocky talking to the developers of Unbound during development. This becomes clear when the game is finished and the credits roll, where a collection of Rocky's ramblings are played in full as names scroll across the screen. Portions of these ramblings were snipped for brevity and put into the escort mission - perhaps to give Rocky more of a presence in the game, but likely also because what Rocky had to say truly inspired the dev team. Passion and dedication is infectious, but Rocky is practically a superspreader for the love of art. Rocky likely talked to the devs, went on long tangents about passion and art and creativity, and the devs were so inspired by it that they implemented a Rocky escort mission just to put his inspiring words into the game to hopefully inspire others to create and enjoy the act of creating.

The best way to create atmosphere around a game is to be passionate about the art of creating the game. Whether you want to create a simulation of reality or a cinematic action-packed adrenaline pumper, being passionate about what you create will reflect in the work you do, even if you're not really great at the execution. This passion shows everywhere in Unbound. The cel-shaded characters and cartoony tire smoke was controversial to a lot of NFS fans, but not to me. It was certainly off-putting at first, coming across as a gimmick rather than a genuine creative choice in the game's advertising. As I kept playing though, it never grew old. The extra diversity in visuals set this game aside from all the other plain, hyper-realistic graphics of every single other racing game on the market - arcade or otherwise.
Sure, the cars you build can look pretty at a standstill or in motion. But when you're driving them hard, whipping them through corners at the speed of light or bashing into cop cars with the force of a thousand fists, there is nothing more cathartic than seeing a cute little demon face scribble itself into existence above your car, satisfied with your chaotic violence. It makes me feel like a fucking anime protagonist. Not a single racing game has made me feel that way before.

Most racing purists would hate this shit - and they do, because purists hate fun. Or rather, they hate anything they don't think is fun. But this? a cute mischeivous lil gremlin popping up on your car when you total another police cruiser? that's fun! it's FUN!
To some they feel these little pop ups are visual clutter that break their immersion. But to me, it just adds more atmosphere to the game. It brings me into this world of cartoonishly fast and grippy cars flying around a fictionalized Chicago with reckless abandon, causing property damage with every corner. It's a childish dream, and Criterion knows that. It makes plain sense that their visual effects mirror that childishness, that giddy excited feeling when a police cruiser goes smoosh.
Unbound is unlike many other modern racing games. The passion from its devs are reflected in all the visuals and characters in the game. You can't find a character like Tess or Yas in games like Forza Horizon or Gran Turismo. It's an atmosphere that has been missing from racing games for about a decade now, but NFS is finally urging the comeback.
I hope this affinity for exciting the eyeballs continues in the future, and that the developers haven't taken the criticism too harshly. I don't think they will, either; Rocky's motivational speeches that emphasized taking risky creative decisions hopefully assured Criterion that you can never please everybody, but you'll certainly please nobody if you don't have dedication to your creative vision.



