Mike Bantick
Saturday, 31 January 2009 09:10
Entertainment
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Each car you buy can be tuned to a degree and customised in look for a price, this is most important when taking your creation online.
The mainstay of Need For Speed games has been the police pursuit; and Undercover has a liberal smattering of cop-crunching action. In fact, each car you own will slowly gain a ‘heat’ level so that even cruising the streets at a nice legal speed, will ultimately attract the law if your car is too well known. This is a nice effect as it forces new cars to be bought, or at least a new paint job on an existing favourite.
Cops can intervene at any point in a mission, adding to the chaos of an existing race or as part of a specific police orientated goal.
To shake a cop chase, you must get out of site of any law enforcer, difficult when helicopters are involved, even more difficult as back-up is called, road blocks are set-up and the realisation hits that the local police constabulary obviously has a budget that can be spent on rather bland looking vehicles with performance tuning that exceeds any exotic super car.
Luckily we have Nitrous, and Speedbreaker (a kind of Bullet-time to allow precise high speed handling) to get us out of tight spots.
Cop chases are exhilarating, exhausting and exasperating all at the same time.
Some missions require you to cause ‘damage to the state’, more effective than ramming civilian cars, taking out bus stops or street lights is destroying cop vehicles. This can be done in a number of ways, the most obvious, is that your car is usually indestructible, so simple ram those suckers. More efficient is to take out the supports of marked structures, causing them to block or land on pursuing vehicles. Wicked stuff.
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