Review: FAST AND FURIOUS HIGHWAY HEIST is Slow and Frustrating
Funko Games recently launched a new board game called Fast & Furious Highway Heist. This game is supposed to give players the chance to live out situations similar to what you would see in a Fast & Furious film. The cooperative game supports 2-4 players, is rated as taking an hour (I found this to be a low estimate), and retails for $29.99. You can purchase it from your favorite local store or a variety of online retailers. Funko Games was kind enough to provide me with a copy of the game, and I’m sharing my own original thoughts below.
Get ready for an exciting new mission based on the blockbuster movie series, playing as Dom, Brian, Letty, Roman, and the rest of Team Toretto on a harrowing high-speed heist! Go up against heavily-armed enemies with your hot cars, daring driving, and jaw-dropping vehicle-to-vehicle leaps of faith. Whether you are taking down a swerving semi filled with valuable cargo, stopping a rampaging tank in its tracks, or bringing down a high-tech helicopter as it rains fire from the skies, you’ll have to work together to take advantage of every team member’s strengths. It’s up to you to pull off the job no other crew can do!
Highway Heist is a game designed by Prospero Hall. These are the same people behind Godzilla: Tokyo Clash, Funkoverse, Horrified, Suspicion, and many more games that I thoroughly enjoy. Highway Heist is their first game that I’ve played that I have not enjoyed. The game offers 3 scenarios and I tried 2 of them for this review, the Tank Assault and Semi Heist ones. Before I get too negative though, I do want to highlight some of the positives.
First, I love the miniatures for this game. They’re a lot of fun to look at and some painters out there could really have fun with this game. I also love how the back of the semi-truck opens up. It’s fantastic. I also like a lot of the art for the game with the exception of the character art. It seems to not match the rest of the game’s art and I’d rather have the people more detailed than the cars and other pieces. In addition, I do enjoy the idea that throughout the game, all of the cars are moving with unmanned vehicles and wrecked pieces moving off the board as the turns go by. This works really well for promoting the theater of the mind.
Sadly, there were a lot of things that I did not like. First, the game does not work with 2 players. The very first game I played was the Tank Assault (recommended to be your first game) with just me and my wife. It was impossible and we technically didn’t even finish. Instead, we saw that it was impossible and just cleaned up because we weren’t having any fun. On your turn, you get two actions. Then, the enemy will do random things with no real way of predicting or accounting for. Every time that my wife and I tried to strategize, the randomness of the enemy would render our strategy moot.
In a cooperative game, the game always feel like it has a leg up on you. That’s how they’re designed and how they typically present a challenge. The problem I have with Highway Heist is that it often felt like the game had about 5 legs up on us. In the Semi Heist (we played with 4 people), there are enemy cards that can deal 6 damage to a vehicle. It’s possible to have a car with as little as 0 defense (if unmanned) or even as little as 1 (manned) which means you’re in for a lot of damage with no way of trying to recover. Once you take damage, that’s it. In the same game of Semi Heist, we won by using the final stunt and had lost 3 of our 4 cars. It felt more like we won because of luck rather than skill which doesn’t feel rewarding.
Going back to stunts, I feel like they weren’t well handled. In Semi Heist, the final stunt gives you a final chance to win. This was actually really good in my opinion. However, in Tank Assault, we had dealt 2 or 3 damage to the tank before it had the audacity to heal with a card. The final stunt is a way to win the game, but is not nearly as possible as the stunt in Semi Heist as you need to roll a minimum of 4 successes and that’s if you’ve played pretty perfectly up until then. It feels impossible too much of the time.
My final complaint is that there’s one section in the rules that confuses me. It says that when resolving effects to do so from West to East and then North to South, but then illustrates the reverse of resolving North to South and then West to East. This actually does make a difference, but I went with the diagram.
I think the game could be improved by having even just one element about the enemy be predictable. As it stands, the enemy turn is 100% random. Having set movement happen every turn would help the game feel a bit more like you can strategize. I also think that having variant rules for a 2-player game would help that feel even remotely possible. As I’ve mentioned, I think that the enemy cards can be too powerful and nerfing some of them could also go a long way without becoming too easy. The final recommendation that I propose is allowing all characters a free move action. 90% of turns are movement and then one other action. That really slows the game down and made it feel like I wasn’t able to do anything useful on my turn.
In my opinion, Highway Heist leans too much on the side of luck and gives the game too much of an advantage. There are some ways that I think the faults can be addressed, but as it is, I really don’t like it. I do really like the minis and the concept of the game. If you’re really into Fast & Furious, then you might like this game more than I did.
