Fast and Furious Arcade Edition arrives on consoles, in a brilliant home conversion which recreates many scenes from the films including Columbia, Havana and Hong Kong, along with Yellowstone, Abu Dhabi and the Swiss Alps.
On the plus side, this arcade-perfect reconstruction is immense fun and brilliantly executed, albeit not an easy run, since you have to come first to win a race. I often lose by mere fractions of a second, since even if you scoot ahead, the game makes sure they’re on your tail by pushing one of your opponents to the top of the field.
I could see that I need to take more advantage of the occasional shortcuts, and was wishing I could take each race one at a time, rather than race all 6 consecutively – but then taking a breather is not what Fast and Furious Arcade Edition is about!
It’s fast AND furious and frenetic and utterly insane!
Initially, turning the wheel takes a little bit of practice, so you turn GRADUALLY, and not jerking to the side, and I also hit a stumbling block when I accidentally put my name in as DOMM and couldn’t seem to change that!
Ah, I had to quit out of the game, and run it again to get it back… and then when I put in DVDFEVER, it just stopped at “DVDFEVE”! I then corrected it to just “DOM”!
One issue is, however, that even when I nitro boost my car, I still end up topping out at 151mph, and I’ve tried several cars! There’s just no difference between the speed and handling aspects of any vehicles.
Plus, once in a while, I’ll hit some sort of blue ‘nitro’ thing that gives me a very brief but faster boost, but that’s about it.
However, on my third go-round – since you’ll go from the initial race set to Extreme Unlocked, and then Extreme X2 Unlocked – for which I won five of the six races in a row, I found that you may as well not ‘nitro’ in the first place, and just save them for the last stretch to zoom ahead of the enemies. I only failed on the sixth one (Swiss Alps, for me) because it ends with a big bend and as I nitro’d, I bounced around all over the place! Took 2 or 3 attempts to overcome that!
That said, I did complete the Abu Dhabi race first time!
One obvious downside is that, oddly, there’s no way to get back to the main menu once you’ve started a game. Hence, I played through all six tracks – and getting first place – three full times, so that’s the regular race, Extreme and Extreme x2 races, which is not easy because you’ll come second MANY times… but all with the same car.
Given that I got through the regular race once, I should’ve been eligible to use the Furious version of that car, but in order to do so, I had to QUIT out of the game and load it back in… by which time, it had forgotten the name I input for the scoreboard, and I was no longer in the Extreme race category. That’s unnecessary and annoying, even though I would’ve just continued going up those categories as there’s no particular end point with those. And I don’t think they felt any different from the regular one.
It’s also a very short experience. Yes, I played it for a few hours, but it doesn’t change in difficulty. As you’ll see from my gameplay, although you can keep going round and round the set of tracks, it’s still only the same 20 minutes over and over. That said, it’s only around £25. Thus, just over the cost of four pints in a city centre bar.
As for the long-running movie franchies, it’s looking like Fast 11‘s chances of a release may have run out of road. 2023’s Fast X had a crazy budget of $378.8m, but took just $714.4m at the box office.
The sequel was expected this year, then pushed to 2026, but now, Fast 11 doesn’t currently have a release date, and might even be cancelled. The studio won’t greenlight the film if the budget goes over $200m, given the underpeformance of Fast X, but it’d be a shame if it came to the end with just one more film to go.
Score: 7.5/10
Thanks to our friends at GameMill Entertainment for the review code for this game.
Fast and Furious Arcade Edition is out now on PS5, Nintendo Switch, and digitally on Xbox Series X.
Important info:
- Developer: Cradle Games, Raw Thrills
- Publisher: GameMill Entertainment
- Players: single-player, local multiplayer
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.