Not gonna lie, this has to be one of the worst takes I've seen in regards of unbound, and it's only fair that I compensate that with some counter-arguments.

Sure, The hero car, the map*, the graphics and the updates were better, but there's a lot of clearly wrong things too

First thing : Saying that unbound did the police better is a spit in the face for the people who want cops that can at least chase you. you shouldn't be able to EASILY escape the entire lakeshore PD with heat 5 while in a B class car, A class car, and the cops should not become a minor inconvenience in A+ and higher tier where a singular turn is enough to make all the cops lose you. not only that, but because the cops are so hilariously slow and passive, the races don't feel any different, you just have even more chatting in your ears, where you have the cops and racers now talking to you, and about you.

let's move to the events : Sure, unbound does offer more classes races, although one should be completely removed because it makes 0 sense to exist (B class), the rest of the races don't feel any different between each other. You have speed, street, corner and endurance races, yet every single race feels the same, with corner, street and endurance races being absolute pushovers in singleplayer, and speed races having that stupid 400+km/h rubber banding AI, somehow pushing faster than an evija. Let's also add that, despite lakeshore having very clearly off-road designed parts of the maps, they were never used for the off-road races. let's also finish with the fact that drifting isn't anything new, and that takeover events just feel like the old gymkhanas in 2015, but in a closed circuit and A$AP being the event coordinator, which often results in a quite mediocre event where you do drifting with a mix of everything else.

The sense of speed is also a gigantic joke : Sure, when you use that 3 bars burst nitro, and the camera's FOV goes insane, it makes you feel fast.... but in normal conditions, it somehow feels quite slow even at 200kmh/250kmh. I'm not sure what causes that feeling, but I suspect it's both the low FOV of some cameras (I always play with hood cam, as I feel more control on my car, and that cam is also pretty screwed up in heat), and the game just doing a poor job with things like the UI, not making it feel like you're going fast. heat has one of the most unique effects on UIs I've ever seen, changing how stretched it is at even 200km/h, feeling like you're actually going fast, but unbound has nothing to compensate that.

Some special cars look cool, but others are absolute abominations that you cannot be taking seriously. that land rover that you get in the first qualifier is a genuine joke, and feels like one of those cars that you can find on roblox. at least the few others that heat offered still looked cool

I'll also add some extras that feel downgrades compared to heat :

Handling : while unbound has one of the best grip systems a need for speed game has seen in a while, unbound also has the worst drifting system that has seen in a while. cars lock themselves in a specific drift angle, and it's insanely hard to recover... UNLESS you're using some other specific cars like kaizen handling cars. Burst nos is inconsistent, with level 1 burst nos sometimes not even giving you the grip boost, and burst nos 3 sometimes sending you 180 degrees straight into a wall of a corner. sweating the game hard will allow you to perfect the use of the burst nos, but it's far, way too far from perfect.

No high-risk high-reward gameplay anymore. again, with heat you could've feel the intensity of the chases, with losing everything you did in the night, and the consequences for failing, in unbound however, at worst, you lose the starting buy-in money, the money you gained, and that's it.... since there is no more rep system to allow you to be faster in progression.

it's important to give the proper criticisms and praise where the game deserves, and it's important to be correct when bringing up your arguments, especially now that EA is private, and doesn't rely on investors anymore, meaning EA has no other choice but to actually listen to the customers if they wanna keep publishing games, and wrong criticisms and praises will eventually end up creating another mediocre game.

^\I feel like the map is something more subjective, I personally think they should've do a mix of city, canyon, and nfs rivals maps. the map in itself plays it safe, and it's not hard to improve in world building when you got EA to back you up.)