Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition

The recent Fast & Furious movies have been a lot of nonsense, and the games are not really any better, with Fast & Furious Crossroads (Slightly Mad Studios, 2020) being a good example. However, this didn't seem to stop Cradle Games from bringing a related arcade romp from a few years ago to home consoles.

Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition skips the characters from the movie and focuses solely on car racing. There is no coherent storyline and the game as a whole consists of individual missions that follow the events of the film, from catching a safe to blowing up a missile. Whatever the mission, the game turns it into a race through a field full of hazards, which must be completed before the allotted time runs out.

In an amusingly contradictory twist, the mission is always run as a group but, despite shouts from friends warning of the dangers, these other members of the group will try to wedge you off the track and prevent you from progressing throughout the journey. If a player does not finish first before the other members of their group, the game is over, even if there is still time left on the clock. However, this doesn't matter either, as the game continues to the next level regardless. In fact, if the player chooses single player or split-screen duel, which are identical in terms of gameplay, the game will offer the same six tracks in succession, without the possibility of interrupting the game and returning to the menu, even to change settings. To do this, I could think of no other way than to return to the desktop, close the game and restart it.

Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition is filmed from behind the car, giving a wide view of the track being driven. This comes in handy, as the cars are ridiculously fast (the game's promotional video features a lot of slowdown). Most of the obstacles and subtleties of the tracks are only memorable after several rounds of play, as your eyes get used to the unnatural racing. It's like watching Fast & Furious on fast-forward in your hot wheels.

The creators must have thought that fast enough speed doesn't require much control of the car, because the game's manoeuvrability is beyond terrible. The car is controlled by the power steering, throttle, brake and turbo. One of the buttons on the controller is dedicated to changing the music. The car's lateral control is so sensitive that even the slightest touch immediately slams the car into the nearest wall, even on a straight road. There's little need to worry about the brakes, as you keep going forward almost without slowing down, even if you're spinning around sideways on concrete bollards or driving into a wall. The game even makes cars scramble through the air until you reach something concrete under the tyres, if, for example, a jump from a mountain to a bridge has fallen short.

You can also hit some tricks in your car. A double tap on the throttle causes the car to momentarily wobble, seemingly adding to the rush with the same literal "wrum wrum" sound regardless of the car selected. At the same command, the car does vertical rolls in the air, not even around its centre, making an already ridiculous function look even more silly. To make matters worse, the function doesn't seem to serve any purpose beyond visual appeal. A separate turbo command acts as an extra boost for longer bowing. This function had to be learned partly by luck, as the settings only instructed you to 'press a button' to activate it. So the button was not explicitly mentioned in the menus, but was revealed in the heat of the game. However, the function has little relevance to the game, as instead of the typical rubber-band effect, the so-called opponents in Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition respond to the player's speed precisely as if glued to the body of a car. Finishing first seems to be more at the mercy of the AI's flair than your own driving skills.

The driving tracks are delightfully varied and detailed. Numerous hazards, dynamic traps, shortcuts and secret routes give the game a larger-than-life feel, reminiscent of the excellent Split/Second: Velocity (Black Rock Studio, 2010). But where Split/Second: Velocity was a high-quality and impressive game, Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition is not. The game's graphics look decades too old. The models and environments are reasonably clear, but the textures are quite simple and no modern effects or lighting are used. The fast pacing goes a long way to forgiving technical underachievement, but yes, this mess is more reminiscent of early 2000s slot games than 2025 console quality. At least the game runs at a blistering pace on Xbox Series X, even in split-screen multiplayer, and doesn't take long to load.

The game's sound effects are unsurprisingly generic and boring. No matter which car you choose to play with, you will hear very similar, if not the same, engine and turbo growls. There is some metallic clanging and rattling in collisions, but the variation is minimal. The atmosphere is created by the snappy electrobeats, one for each level. Even though you can switch between the six songs in the middle of a ride, the music quickly becomes familiar.

While you can't expect a very deep gaming experience from a slot game, and the Fast & Furious theme creates a certain amount of anticipation, I wasn't quite ready for this outcome. It wasn't enough that mechanically Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition is an over-the-top yawner, but when gameplay and narrative-wise the game doesn't really have any logic, let alone much sense, I don't know what the creators were thinking. Sure, the game offers a few laughs, especially when playing with a friend, but when the content is played in less than 20 minutes, the relatively cheap price of around 25€ doesn't seem fair.