I think I realised at quite an early age that some games which felt bombastic and exciting in my local arcade, didn’t translate quite so well onto the smaller screen and less capable console hardware which found a home in my admittedly frequently untidy bedroom. Fast forward three decades or so (cough) and a similar situation has reared its head with Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition – a racing effort that while not without charm and its own sense of innovation, arguably feels much more at home in the hustle and bustle of a gaming arcade, rather than on home consoles where its limitations are laid painfully bare.
Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition PS5 Review
Developed by Raw Thrills, the same outfit which brought the underrated Cruis’n Blast for Nintendo Switch, Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition absolutely does what it says on the tin for better or worse. A largely direct port of the arcade game which shares its name, Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition hardly puts its best foot forward once the game has been started, with very poorly compressed video playing on the title screen in some sort of attract mode style sequence which sadly manages to achieve anything but.
A few button presses and some properly loud and cringey lines from the game’s annoying announcer later, it isn’t long before you’ve chosen your car and find yourself in Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition proper. With six different levels to choose from which each take place in a different part of the world, including such eye-opening locations as Hong Kong, Havana, Colombia and more, it’s literally off to the races as Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition has you not only racing your fellow petrolheads for supremacy, but also tasks players with accomplishing an objective such as preventing a missile launch or stopping a bomb.
Now while such objectives sound appropriately exciting, it’s worth noting that there’s nothing really else you need to do other than be in first place, since success or failure simply depends whether or not your car jumps into whatever missile launch or bomb you’ve been tasked with stopping. As a result this makes these ‘objectives’ just feel like an extra bit of aesthetic window dressing for the traditional first past the post racing mechanic, which is a tad disappointing.
Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition doesn’t give a jot about ray tracing, global illumination or any of that stuff, as this is very much a 2022 era arcade game which feels like a mid-gen PS3 title that has been brought kicking and screaming onto current consoles with precious little in the way of meaningful changes. In fact, Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition barely gives a frosted turd about the license it shares its namesake with (Dom Toretto and company certainly never went on motorborne adventures quite as ridiculous as this – and that’s saying something), outside of judicious use of the Fast & Furious font and some of the vehicles from the movies appearing in the game.
If you can look past such things, the actual core gameplay of Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition is actually pretty enjoyable, at least for a little while. Played out at predictably breakneck speed, every race that you have in Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition has you barrelling down a road, pulling off slow motion style leaps through windows, across canyons, through buildings and other such daredevil feats that all seemingly occur at 200 miles per hour.
There’s a real emphasis on cinematic set piece destruction here that you just don’t see in modern racing games these days. For PlayStation gamers, the closest point of comparison would likely be 2010’s PS3 release, Split/Second, as Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition has you careening through massive industrial complexes, speeding through crumbling canyons and tearing across roads that are seemingly exploding all around you.
While there’s no need to really slow down at all and you’re being constantly forced forward towards your goal, Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition can feel less like a traditional racing game and more like a rollercoaster ride at times, which again suits its provenance as an arcade game where such shallow gameplay can hardly be criticised in three to five minute play sessions in environments that are full of noise and other such distractions.
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That said however, there is still a modicum of skill required to nab that elusive first place position in each of the races and a large part of that comes down to knowing when to trigger the all-important nitrous to boost yourself ahead of competition, while EMP style power ups can also be tactically used to disable your adversaries. You can also do takedowns of other vehicles too by forcefully ramming them off the road, but because there aren’t any real physics systems at play here akin to those you might see in something like Burnout Paradise for example, when you take cars down they essentially spin up and into orbit as if they weigh less than a feather and so feels much less palpable as a result.
Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition also attempts to spice things up by providing players with alternative routes to take which are off the beaten path too, resulting in faster times, so long as you remember to take them in the first place. Though the core gameplay which sits at the heart of Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition is enjoyable in both its single-player and split-screen multiplayer modes, by far the biggest flaw which afflicts the game is its limited content offering. Simply put, Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition just needs more of everything. It needs more tracks (there are just six in the game), more vehicles, more on-track power-ups, more modes and just more reasons to keep on playing overall.
While you would hardly have to worry about such things when you pumping in coins into an arcade machine you might only intend to spend five minutes or so with, at home, where Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition would attempt to sustain your attention for a lot longer, the current content offering just falls woefully short. As a result, folks that were hoping Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition would be something comparable to the hugely fun Cruis’n Blast – it just isn’t by long shot as the latter simply has so much more content to sink your teeth into and is just a better arcade racer in just about every way.
I can well imagine that when you’re situated in a hydraulic miniature car attached to an arcade machine that is blaring out the audiovisual presentation of Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition at full tilt, that it’s something of a compelling if not a mildly intoxicating quick fix of arcade racing goodness. At home however, and stripped of such performative trickery, Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition fails to impress and really needs much more meat wrapped around its bones to justify its existence away from the din of the arcade scene which birthed it.
Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition is out now on PS5.
Review code kindly provided by PR.