The lightning-fast review of Fast & Furious Arcade Edition

Do you miss the good old days, when things were simple and you could shoot down an enemy satellite by launching a car with two people into space? Do you curse the bigoted legislation that prevents you from opening the NOS valve on the highway to beat traffic and avoid being late for work again today? Are you firmly convinced that the Fast & Furious saga is the best superhero epic on the big screen of the modern era? Well, although there is wisdom in only one of the three previous rhetorical questions, we still have the solution for you: Fast & Furious Arcade Edition is ready to rev its (tuned like a celebrity makeup artist's) engines on your Consoles. 

Fast & Furious Arcade Edition: Nomen Omen

There are films whose content can be deduced simply from the title. The standard-bearer of this underrated, and often mocked, category is Snakes on a Plane: there are snakes on a plane, I mean, how do you expect it to end? In the front row, however, there is also Fast & Furious: concentrate and tell me if you can think of a formula that more precisely defines Vin Diesel behind the wheel than “fast & furious”. As a video game adaptation of such a parent, of course Fast & Furious Arcade Edition carries on the tradition with a title that Anglo-Saxons would call “What You See Is What You Get”. No surprise then to discover that the heart of the game is a deeply arcade racing game set in the Fast & Furious narrative universe.

Unfortunately, this does not mean that we will be able to lend our hands to virtual alter egos of Dom, Brian, Giselle, or the rest of the crew. Nor that we will find ourselves flooring the pedal in some of the most famous cars taken directly from the films. More simply, the license concerns the narrative universe: translated into video game terms, we will take part in frantic four-wheeled races that take place on incredible and spectacular tracks, riddled with collateral events such as missiles, collapses, or explosions. Obviously, the borrowing also extends to the laws of physics, so cars can race at insane speeds, take jumps dozens of meters into the air, perform aerial evolutions, and land without a scratch, bouncing between guardrails like ping-pong balls. Anything goes: nitro boosts and wild ramming to reach the finish line first and save the world. You don't race for glory in Fast & Furious Arcade Edition, but to prevent a bomb from exploding, a jet from taking off, or a safe from closing… always, of course, by crossing the finish line first. 

Fast & Furious Arcade Edition: from the arcade to home

True to its title, Fast & Furious Arcade Edition is exactly a re-proposition of the eponymous arcade title, nothing more and nothing less, for better or worse. For the better because its undeniable spectacularity looks great even on home televisions and because games like this are no longer made, which sounds like the cringe lament of a boomer, but is ultimately a truth. The pick-up-and-play game has almost disappeared from home video games, saved at the last minute by roguelites, but submerged by titles that require hours and hours and hours of our limited time. With its driving model where the brake button is optional, its 6 missions, and its 8 cars (all identical in performance), Fast & Furious Arcade Edition immediately puts everything it has to offer on the table, without requiring any effort to complete it to access any extras, which are not present anyway. The scenarios are those, the cars are those, and there are only two modes: the classic Arcade which repeatedly offers you all the tracks one after the other until you have achieved first place in each (thus saving the world) and a local Versus through which it is possible to challenge a friend (or even an enemy, that's kind of your business) by hosting them on your sofa and lending them a controller. Of course, for the console debut, they could have tried to include something more, but the choice instead fell on a port practically identical to the original, sold however at a budget price (or almost, come on). 

The downside for the duration measurable in an afternoon is that, as in the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, the experience can be fragmented into a myriad of incredibly fun, exhilarating, and satisfying pick-up-and-play sessions. A race in Dubai or a chase in Havana are concentrated pills of video game that can be fitted into any moment of the day or life, in the ten minutes of waiting before the kick-off of a match, while the water boils, or during a Kojima cut-scene (just kidding, just kidding!), always fulfilling their purpose, which is to pour abundant doses of dopamine into the body (without ulterior motives, as we are used to). In a funny paradox, once upon a time, people couldn't wait to have arcade games on consoles, so they could play them without pouring tons of coins into the manager's coffers. Today, however, that we can play everything at home, those productions like “I'll play a game since I have 7 minutes before going out” are missing, also because given the abundance of the offer we all tend to give a certain value to our money. But is there really a difference between the money spent on [any game of at least 100 hours] bought and launched three times in total and that invested in a decidedly smaller game that takes 3 hours in total and can be restarted for a quick spin every now and then? Or, to get more philosophical: do we really need 100 identical side quests and a thousand collectibles to stretch the broth? I don't know, on the other hand, going back to Fast & Furious Arcade Edition we are talking about a game that makes healthy and brutal “ignorance” its guiding spirit and therefore this is probably not the right place for reflections of this kind. But one must recognize Fast & Furious Arcade Edition's commendable intellectual honesty in presenting itself exactly for what it is: and I, with all its limitations, appreciated it as such; short, but intense.