I was interested in the console port for this game because I really liked developer Raw Thrills Cruis'n Blast on Nintendo Switch. I figured "Oh, this is a Fast and Furious game that plays like Crui'n. That sounds great", so I bought it on Xbox. I was wrong. Cruis'n Blast is really fantastic and you should check it out. Fast and Furious Arcade Edition, on the other hand, sucks butt.
What's wrong with it? Well, everything. There are only six tracks that are vaguely sort of kind of like locations from the movies, and eight cars that are only tangentially related to vehicles from the movies. And the cars are all American, by the way, with no import tuners in sight. It also has to be noted that there isn't really any difference in how the 8 vehicles play. They all feel pretty much exactly the same. The tracks are all gimmicks, too, in that they play up the "saving the world" espionage stuff the movies turned into instead of being about actual racing, so you don't really "win" a race, and instead jump across the finish line to defuse a bomb or derail a train or stop a missile or something. It's dumb as hell.
When you win on each track with the same car you unlock a "furious" version of that car with neon lights and 10 nitrous which makes the races easy as hell. And when you win on every track with a "furious" version of a car, you unlock "extreme" mode where all of the A.I. cars are also the "furious" versions so it's slightly more challenging. And that's all the content. Six tracks that you're expected to play over and over again with 8 cars that all play exactly alike. There's maybe 30-minutes of actual content here that they artificially stretched into several incredibly bland and repetitive and boring hours. I know it was an arcade game, but goddamn. This is pretty atrocious.
The real issue is how the game plays. It's bad. I'll say it feels OK - it's very, very arcade-y and loose and physics don't exist and realism is thrown out the window - which is fine. What isn't fine is that the game is essentially just an amusement park ride and not a real racing game. What I mean by that is that everything is scripted so that no matter how fast or slow you go you never come up short on a jump, the action-y set pieces also go off perfectly right in front of you, and the ending of every race is ridiculously tight with you barely winning or losing by a split second. It's literally like a theme park ride where you're just automatically rolling in a cart on a track through a tunnel while stuff happens around you.
At first, it seems almost impossible to win. It really feels like you have to hit every shortcut and use every power up and carefully manage your nitrous and generally race perfectly in order to even come close to winning. I'll repeat, it really truly does feel almost impossible at first.
Then I did a little experiment. I intentionally went very, very slowly to see what would happen. And, you know what, all of the A.I. cars also went very, very slowly as well. The game is completely scripted to match your pace no matter how fast you go. The game is also scripted so that no matter what you're doing, at the very end in the lead up to the finish line, your car gets a huge turbo boost so you magically catch up to the leaders and get that cinematic ultra close photo finish. It turns out that the game isn't difficult at all, and is actually pretty stupidly easy as long as you save at least one nitrous for the very end to ensure you finish first.
That. Sucks. Nothing you do during the races matters at all. No matter how fast or slow you go, the finish is always going to be insanely close and you're always going to be first or second. It's utterly pointless and not especially fun. Once you figure out the "trick", any fun in this game completely disappears.
I suppose I might as well make it clear that I'm not actually that much of a fan of the Fast and Furious movies. I love the first one, and the third one, and that's it. They are the only ones actually about racing and cars. The other ones are all about heists and espionage and ridiculously dumb set pieces that make no sense and I lost interest.
Anyway, back to this game. The presentation is also really disappointing, but it does at least start on a positive note. The Kyoto track is phenomenal looking with cherry blossoms everywhere and neon and great lighting and it really looks great. The other tracks all look like Xbox 360 era ugly low res butt. The tracks look bad. The cars look horrible. The sound is bad.
In the end, Fast and Furious Arcade Edition is just a bad game all around. The presentation is poor, the content is seriously lacking, and the gameplay is putrid. It also has almost nothing to do with the Fast and Furious movies. It's such a disappointing waste of time and money that I cannot recommend to anyone.
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