Fast & Furious’s video game history is longer than you might think. Alongside home console and PC releases like the maligned Crossroads, there have been five licensed arcade cabinet games between 2004 and 2022. All of them were developed by arcade game specialist Raw Thrills, founded by Eugene Jarvis, creator of the Cruis’n games.
Releasing on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch today (24th October), Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition is a home port of the most recent 2022 arcade game, Fast & Furious Arcade.
It shares the same engine as Cruis’n Blast, which was released for arcades in 2017 before being ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021. This isn’t the first crossover between the two franchises either: the 2009 Cruis’n Wii game was an unlicensed port of the original 2004 Fast & Furious arcade game.
It’s no surprise, then, that Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition looks and plays almost exactly like its brethren. That’s a high bar, because that home port is one of the most bonkers arcade racers on Switch.
Unfortunately, this new game isn’t in the same league.
Fun for the family
As you race against seven opponents in exotic locations like Havana and Hong Kong, this latest film spin-off isn’t short on spectacle.
Environments are filled with destructible scenery, and you’re constantly dodging explosions from rocket-firing helicopters. Despite the on-screen chaos, performance is impressively solid, aside from some slight slowdown when activating shockwave power-ups.
Each race is loosely tied to a mission, whether it’s derailing a train, stealing gold or stopping a missile from launching. Finishing first completes the objective, concluding with you destroying a large vehicle, like a drone or plane, by driving into it in a fiery crash. Events are played in a random order and repeated on shuffle until you complete the mission.
One setpiece sees you crash through a church and destroy the benches before jumping and smashing through a stained-glass window. Admittedly, some of the spectacle is lost without the arcade game’s cabinet and giant screen, but these high octane stunts wouldn’t look out of place in a Fast & Furious film.
Likewise, the exaggerated vehicle handling fits the franchise. Ignoring the laws of physics, vehicles can make absurdly high jumps, flip in the air and perform wheelies on the fly, the latter executed by double-tapping the accelerator. Naturally, cars are equipped with a nitro boost, topped up by holding drifts.
The simple, if oversensitive, handling is easy for players of all ages to get to grips with, making it fun for the whole, wait for it, family.
Not so fast
However, connections to the franchise are otherwise tenuous. There’s not even one mention of the f-word.
Despite carrying the official license, none of the characters from the films appear. A Fast & Furious-branded game without the likes of Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez or Tyrese Gibson lending their likenesses or voices seems sacrilegious.
Fast & Furious Crossroads was flawed, but at least it attempted to tell an original story in the saga, with new and returning characters appearing in cut scenes – even if it highlighted that Slightly Mad Studios is better at modelling cars than human characters.
As such, the branding feels forced when it’s clearly a reskinned version of Cruis’n Blast. It could have been sold as a DLC expansion rather than a standalone game.
Fan-favourite cars from the increasingly ludicrous movie series are noticeably absent, too. Domonic Toretto’s 1970 Dodge Charger R/T headlines the car roster, alongside the Corvette Grand Sport that plummeted off a bridge in Fast Five. However, you can’t drive cars like Brian O’Connor’s Toyota Supra MKIV from the original film or Han Lue’s Mazda RX-7 from Tokyo Drift.
Licensing issues are likely to blame, but the car selection is disappointingly sparse, with only eight playable vehicles. Other cars like the Corvette Stingray Z06 lifted from Cruis’n Blast, which has yet to appear in a Fast & Furious film, seem out of place.
Fate of the Furious
With rock-solid performance, clean visuals and snappy vehicle handling, Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition is a faithful conversion from arcade machine to console. Unfortunately, this is a blessing and a curse. With no extra content and only six missions, the campaign can be completed in under 30 minutes if you win every event the first time.
This is fine for a quick fix in an arcade, but the home console version leaves you feeling shortchanged – even at the budget price of £24.99 / €29,99.
With only six locations and eight main cars, it’s a considerably lighter package than Cruis’n Blast, which features over 20 vehicles and nearly 30 tracks in the expanded Switch port. Granted, many were variants of existing tracks with alternative routes and set pieces, but its cup-based campaign is more fulfilling.
Completing every mission unlocks a bonus ‘Extreme Mode’ that ramps up the difficulty. You can also unlock heavily modified ‘Furious’ editions of every car, but the paltry number of locations makes repeating the events to unlock them become tiresome quickly.
Blatant rubber banding AI also makes replaying events a slog. Taking first place in the Havana and Hong Kong events seems impossible until you get near the finish line, resulting in you repeatedly hammering the wheelie button to get a speed boost near the end of the event.
While split-screen offers some local multiplayer fun, a lack of online multiplayer diminishes the replay value once you’ve completed the campaign.
Fast & Furious Arcade is a straightforward port that delivers bombastic, action-packed racing, but there’s not enough fuel in the tank to keep you occupied for long.
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