We’ve never wanted to recommend a racer more than Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition.
This scrappy PS5 port of a 2022 arcade cabinet hails from Raw Thrills, the US-based dev founded by coin-op royalty Eugene Jarvis.
If you’ve not stepped foot in a sticky arcade for several years, you may know the studio best for its criminally underrated Cruis’n Blast on the Switch, a racer so ostentatious with its course design it’ll see you plummeting several hundred metres in one daring leap.
Fast & Furious: Arcade Edition maintains that same energy, and takes you on a globe-trotting journey across several real-world locations, like Yellowstone and Hong Kong.
Each track is larger than life, loosely representing the location it’s inspired by with distinctive motifs and details. The Abu Dhabi track, for example, sees you smashing through the glittering glass windows of the Marina Mall.
You have a variety of licensed supercars to choose from, many of which are inspired by cars from the films, including the Dodge Charger R/T.
But while each car has different stats attributed to it, they all handle largely the same.
And unfortunately, this is the worst part of the game: port studio Cradle Games has done a poor job translating the original wheel-based controls to the DualSense, making cars twitchy and loose.
To make matters worse, races devolve into simplistic sprints to the finish line, with rubber banding used to keep things close until you reach the final straight. If you’ve saved up enough nitro and kept yourself in and around the top three, you’ll win.
And that’s all there is to the game really. Each race is presented in sequence, and it doesn’t really matter whether you win or lose.
Although if you do happen to win every race with a particular car, you’ll unlock that vehicle’s Furious mode, which allows you to do it all over again with 10 Nitros instead of three.
Other than that, there’s split-screen multiplayer for up to two people and that’s your lot. There are no real unlocks, alternative ways to play, or minigames. For a game that retails for £24.99/$29.99, it’s paper thin.
We think we could forgive its simplicity if the handling was better and the price was lower, because there is fun in the outrageous nature of some of the tracks.
But as it stands, this merely tickles the Cruis’n Blast itch – there’s not nearly enough meat on its bones to scratch it.