The Need For Speed Unbound Cops Vs Racers Update Is A Throwback To An NFS Classic

Get your rose-tinted glasses out: the latest Unbound update is a love letter to the Hot Pursuit games

22 Aug 2024

Need for Speed Unbound Cops Vs Racers update promo art

Ask anyone who’s played lots of Need for Speed games to name their top three entries in the franchise, and there’s a good chance that at least one of them will be one of the three Hot Pursuit titles. The games, which focused on either escaping the cops or taking the role of them and bringing down racers, serve as the inspiration for the latest update for Need for Speed Unbound.

Just look at that promo art, which is a clear nod to the cover of the 2010 reboot of Hot Pursuit. Here, though, the Pagani Zonda and Lamborghini Reventon have been swapped out for the two cars that arrive in this update; two very different hypercars, but both representing the cutting-edge tech from their respective eras.

Lotus Evija and Porsche 959 in Need for Speed Unbound

One is the Lotus Evija, an all-electric, four-motor beast with 2,012bhp, and the other is the Porsche 959 S, the more performance-focused version of Porsche’s tech tour de force hypercar from the late ’80s. Both, as is the norm for the game, come with a full suite of customisation parts.

The real headline, though, is the new online Cops Vs Racers game mode, directly inspired by the Hot Pursuit games. Playing as the racer, things are a lot more simple: you’re in a regular race, with the added challenge of a group of cops in machinery that’s a bit more intense than a diesel Hyundai i30 trying to stop you.

A selection of police cars in Need for Speed Unbound

The cops, meanwhile, will have access to a range of tech to try and stop the racers, including spike strips and EMPs. There’s also a new cop progression system that’ll see you start out with a relatively basic car and tech and wind up with a pursuit-spec hypercar and the full suite of tech like you’re the star of some kind of 1980s action TV series.

A final neat inclusion is the new Cop Customs available for various cars, which give you the ability to deck them out not just in the police livery of the game’s fictional US setting of Lakeshore, but designs inspired by international police schemes including the UK, Germany and Japan. No Polizei Lamborghinis that we can see, though – boo.

The update’s out now across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, and PC.

The first full sentence spoken by an infant Mike was a review of the ride quality of a Volvo 850. It was “Daddy’s car goes bumpy-bump on a bumpy road,” so would probably need proofreading a bit, but it was a start.