Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition Review – Fun That Fades Fast

Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition Review

Arcade games are such a frantic, intense experience that rarely translates properly to home consoles. Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition is a prime example of this problem. At the arcade, this is an incredible joyride full of flipping cars, colorful explosions, and amazing courses. At home, you come to the sinister realization that there’s maybe an hour’s worth of content to play through. More if you unlock the supercharged versions of every car. But in doing so, you will thoroughly memorize the six courses available.

On the other hand, this handful of races is a blast. You’re doing wheelies, smashing through obstacles, drift-boosting at every turn, and soaring through the skies. Every course is smashed with colors, the cars are awesome, and first place is hotly contested. You’re either a winner (1st place) or a loser (every other place), so the tension is real. I lost the first few races before I realized just how critically important it is to be drifting constantly. After that epiphany, the rest of the game started making more sense.

If you win all six races, you can try the extreme versions of the same courses. You also unlock a better version of the car you’ve been using. It’s got way more nitro boosts and better stats. The different cars have unique handling and stats, so there’s real merit in trying cars until you find what works for you. You can also change the car’s colors before you race? In case it’s not terribly obvious, I have completely run out of things to talk about re: Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition. I can’t overstate how brief the whole experience is.

It’s Over Already?

This is the trouble with porting an arcade game to the home console space. These titles are meant to be played in short bursts, using specialized controls in a noisy space exploding with colors. You should be sitting in a giant plastic chair with a seatbelt and a steering wheel, not plopped down on your couch in relative silence. Plus, without the constant need to pump more tokens into the machine, there’s a certain tension that’s missing.

In fact, if you pay the equivalent cost in tokens at the arcade, you’ll see all this game has to offer. And you’ll have more fun! Even winning all six races with a specific car has you repeating courses until you get first place. You could get sick of certain tracks before you switch vehicles a single time.

Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition is a lot of fun, for about an hour or so. After that, you’re running the same six courses with different vehicles until you’ve memorized them. Along the way, you’ll almost certainly get sick of seeing these races run over and over. While the essential arcade experience has been successfully ported to consoles, you still lose something essential in doing so. If you can find this game at your local arcade, you’d be better off playing it there. These races are just more fun with the noise, the lights, and the specialized controls.

***A PS5 code was provided by the publisher***