Fast and Furious Arcade Edition – PS5 Review

Fast and Furious Arcade Edition is the home version of Raw Thrills’ 2022 arcade machine, only without the twin 65” UHD screens. It’s fun to see that even they resort to weapons grade bullshots on their publicity material, what’s shown there are in fact renders as shown on the loading screens.

This reviewer likes his films a little less neon-lit, unless they’re directed by Nicholas Winding Refn or Edgar Wright anyway, so it is fair to conclude we’ve largely ignored the franchise since the first one, yet Universal are coining it with eleven films total after the first film exceeded expectations.

So it is fair to conclude that this isn’t our sort of thing either? Well, yes and no. We love a decent arcade racer here at PSC, so it was a reasonable assumption to make that we’d find some value here. Heck, Daytona USA is among our favourite driving games ever.

At the outset everything is very bright and flashy and you’re seeing the game’s arcade origins. You get to choose from one of six tracks and having done so, you are asked to select a car from one of the eight US cars available.

We had an Xbox One during the promotion for the Furious 7 film in 2015 when there was a Forza Horizon 2 standalone spin-off released. Fast and Furious Arcade Edition features a similar lineup to that, but things take a rapid change of direction after that.

Whereas the Forza tie-in used the excellent map of the south of France, the lineup here is rather more globetrotting, with tracks in Switzerland, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East.

We first chose the track set in Hong Kong and were immediately struck by one glaring issue. The steering being so over-responsive as to be impossible on default settings. This may be due to the game being designed for steering wheels in its original context, but in a home environment it is a worry. Perhaps using a steering wheel on PS5 will mitigate the matter, but we suspect not. You see, upon steering in a direction, the vehicle will veer as directed, but the second you release the direction input, it auto returns to going in a straight line. Hardly the most refined steering implementation.

Once again, this might well be down to the arcade origins of the game, but might just be a bodge job by publisher GameMill’s work for hire devs Cradle Games. Incidentally, their previous work includes such stellar titles like Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club, Jumanji: Wild Adventures and most notably, their own original RPG Hellpoint. So not exactly an accomplished driving game studio then.

As you’re driving you can choose to perform extra stunts, use three nitrous boosts available from the outset and nobble the AI drivers with electricity pulses, but the latter only become available once you’ve completed a lap of the respective tracks. The same goes for the frequent shortcuts, the voiceover lady announcing ‘shortcut’ as you pass them the first time.

When you get to the end of each race you have a task to fulfil by crashing into it as the leader of the race, handily the game tells you in a tool tip “You must finish in first place to win a race.” You’ll get a trophy for finishing a race on each track regardless. You see, your progress until the final corners is largely irrelevant as you might be driving an absolute blinder but the AI drivers will be stuck to you like they’re being towed by you.

Such rubberbanding we’ve not seen in a driving game in recent memory, certainly not on PS5 anyway. It renders your progress until that point entirely moot and you soon realise that the only way to win a race is to save a nitrous boost for the final corner and pray to whatever entity is your preference that no AI drivers get in your way as otherwise, they’ll speed to victory and you’ll be in second place with no win to show for it.

You see, no matter what stunts, flourishes or boosts you utilise, they make zero difference to how fast you go in relation to the absurd AI drivers. We expect they’re meant to replicate the eight players in an arcade setting, but how this wasn’t picked up in playtesting, we’ll never know. It makes for close races, yes, but you’ll soon realise that Fast and Furious Arcade Edition is ultimately shallower than a municipal boating lake in the height of summer heat. It’s the game equivalent of Tim Lovejoy’s execrable 2007 book, Lovejoy on Football. Read this review extolling how terrible it is.

Each race is little more than a fairground ride over in just over two minutes. While this might represent good value for a pound at the arcade, it gets old very quickly in the home context. The lack of depth is very apparent, moreso when you beat all races in a single session and unlock EXTREME MODE. This amounts to little more than a flashing red banner on the screen between races but not much more. Races don’t appear to be any different.

Perhaps in an arcade setting it makes the marquee flash in an attempt to rope in extra punters to play, but it feels superfluous here.

The only real incentive you have for progressing is to unlock Furious Mode for each of the eight cars, that being a load of neon detailing and ten boosts per race. While they make little difference in terms of  beating your opponents, they are the key to getting atop the leaderboard for each race location. The only powerup that makes any real difference is the electric shock, but even that isn’t immune to the rubberbanding.

Talking of the race locations, they’re all pretty uninspiring. All rollercoaster climbs and huge jumps into the void, physics be damned. The powerups scattered around them are supposed to inject some excitement, but when it’s you against seven other racers who you simply can’t shift, it all feels irrelevant. Each has an objective at the very end that you have to crash into, amusingly the one in the Swiss Alps has an ICBM that you’re mean to destroy. Last we checked, Switzerland was still neutral.

If the tracks were more inspiring than they are, we’d welcome a setting that tweaked the opponent driving behaviour so your actions actually made something of a difference. Such as the nitrous actually giving you a lead. As things stand though, single player is largely joyless.

As well as single player, there’s also splitscreen multiplayer with a second controller required. However, it is immediately clear that it is bedevilled by the same issues that dog singleplayer mode. Rubberbanding is just as bad and the outcome almost as foregone with a boost needed on the final corner to win.

In fact, we ran a little experiment to check what happened when we left the controller unattended. You’re prompted to accelerate as you might expect, but after a while you’ll be warped to catch up. To the extent that one race, our idle second controller got second place with our primary player in first. We suspect this is a technical limitation in terms of how the track is loaded, but it also might explain why the rubberbanding is so bad as it probably uses the same system.

Graphically, everything runs along at a fair clip but as we’ve observed, everything in Fast and Furious Arcade Edition is artifice. So while it might look nice, the game mechanics and gameplay are so insipid they might as well be an episode of Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads. Audio is pretty uninspiring too with a drone that doesn’t really change. Music is best left muted, it might work in an arcade setting but it sure doesn’t in a home environment. We put on a decent record instead rather than listen to the dirges on offer.

The cars are ostensibly different with supposedly different performance attributes, but it all feels like it makes no real difference to your progress. You can also get a quick start at the beginning of the race if you time your acceleration right, but again, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s all showboating.

At £24.99 on the PS Store, we foresee poor kids that get this for Christmas from a well-meaning relative fast becoming furious upon receiving this in a couple of months. If you’re a parent, take your kid to the local bowling alley and see if they have this. Waste a pound coin on a credit to get it out of their system. Don’t buy the home version.

In conclusion, Fast and Furious Arcade Edition might well be a faithful arcade port that looks the part, but everything else is really not good. No matter how fast you drive or how many boosts and tricks you pull off, the AI rubberbanding is so unrelenting and your progress makes so little difference to progress, you’ll soon realise that it all comes down to the final corner regardless of how well you drive. The steering is awful but that pales into insignificance next to the laundry list of other issues that bedevil this game. Avoid it at all costs. We played this so you don’t have to. The balance issues are the main problem, but also how built on artifice everything is.

In fact, go and buy Burnout Paradise Remastered instead. Now that’s a brilliant racing game. Or consider the latest game that the same devs did, Wreckreation. It’s sure to be better than this fiasco.