Review: Need For Speed Undercover – When dodge-’ems take to the streets

By Mike Bantick
Saturday, 31 January 2009 08:10

Entertainment

The Need For Speed franchise has been around since 1994.  For almost a decade and a half we have been stealing, racing and crashing expensive cars, flaunting the highway patrol and trying to impress pretty girls (and pretty boys for that matter).  It’s probably time we settled down, bought ourselves a nice family wagon, and retired to the suburbs.  Instead we head back out to the tar in Need For Speed Undercover

It is going to be hard to resist comparing Need For Speed Undercover with either its predecessors or a game such as the recent Midnight Club: Los Angeles.   Undercover is after all an incremental version of a series that has been with video gaming for almost 15 years!

Need For Speed Undercover
	Developer	Black Box
	Publisher	EA
	Rating	G
Xbox 360, Wii, DS, PC,PSP, PS2, Reviwed on PS3

Much of the Need For Speed character remains in this iteration, but much of what makes a modern day game is not present.  That is not to say that Undercover doesn’t include the fun factor however.

The single player story mode is an old school The Fast and The Furious inspired series of FMV cut scenes featuring young things portraying over aggressively spoken males and gratuitously filmed females in a tale of an undercover law enforcement agent (you) trying to bust up a series of smugglers and illegal street racing gangs.  Though, by the end of the story you must wonder if the undercover approach was worth the cost in property damage to society.

So under this guise you must build reputation and cash amongst the street racing fraternity.  This will ingratiate your way with the gangs, gaining trust to climb the ranks and take out the big-guys.

NFSU deals out the action at a furious pace; there is no need for downtime in the game if you wish, with the next mission a mere button push away at the conclusion of an earlier one.

Loading times are sufferable and the action is soon underway.  Racing consists of group sprints, and circuits, checkpoint time trials, and one-on-one duals.  Then there the special missions, more on those later.

During sprints and circuits the streets become race tracks, with indestructible guide rails replacing once free intersections, thus ensuring the racers remain on course.  This does result in a weird effect during these encounters:  That being the phenomenon of civilian cars making unexpected (and obviously programmed) turns into and through these temporary, but indestructible barriers.  This is somewhat surprising to a street racer about to pass the slow moving traffic, a car turning into a street that isn’t there.

There are multiple paths through any single encounter, as well as a smattering of not-so-secret shortcuts through road works and the like.

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