NIDZUMI+

Need for Speed is one of the unchanging constants of the universe. EA can always be relied upon to release a game that will at least provide a solid fix of high octane racing. It is one of their titles that tends to polarise opinion though. In racing game spheres most players are either Midnight Club fans or Need for Speed fans and there is usually little that can be done to sway these loyalties.

Last outing EA made a huge blunder which could have been enough to tempt Need for Speed fans to switch over to Rockstar’s street racing competitor. Need for Speed Pro Street ditched the free roaming aspect and returned to a more rigid racing dynamic seemingly due to the surprising and indeed resonating success of Codemaster’s RaceDriver: Grid. Grid came out of left field and spooked EA into making what turned out to be one of arcade racing’s greatest lemons of recent times.

Fast forward to today and Need for Speed returns to the free roaming rogue street racing format with Undercover – an attempt to regain the glory days of NFS: Underground 2, the undoubted pinnacle of the series. Since NFS: Underground 2, each successive release in the franchise (Pro Street excluded) can be likened to a clone of the original with some odd genetic defects. The frustratingly irritating canyon races of NFS: Carbon are an excellent example of this. Each defect was borne from an attempt to improve on Underground 2. Unfortunately, such ‘improvements’ were ultimately the downfall of each game.

With Undercover it seems that EA have tried valiantly to escape these past mistakes. Sadly it has still retained many of the flaws which limit the game’s potential to shine. We’ll get to those in a minute though.

Undercover casts you as a cop using his driving skills to infiltrate a ring of extremely skilled car thieves. In order to gain favour with the gang you will need to gain a reputation for mean driving and also give the state police a fair hassle into the bargain. Proving your worth also requires indulging in some Gone in 60 Second’s style car thievery which provides a pleasant distraction to the disappointingly repetitive slog of checkpoints, sprints and circuits. The annoying canyon races also make a return in the form of outrun races which pit you against a fast moving opponent on the freeway. Unsurprisingly the badly-acted full motion video cutscenes are back with a vengeance, with Maggie Q and Christina Milian providing the distractions this time around.

The core of Undercover remains the same as has been with all Need for Speed games. There is a solid, well balanced driving dynamic and all the tracks are well thought out and different enough to provide a interesting enough challenge. There is also an excellent array of cars ranging from classics like the Chevrolet Camaro SS, through the impressive Nissan GT-R to exotic European cars like the Pagani Zonda. All the usual customisation options are there too although there are far less body kits available than there have been previously. The ones that are there can be autosculpted but this time around it seems to do very little to change how the parts look.

The handling is good and suitably arcadey. The American muscle cars slide and drift effortlessly and the European and Japanese entries provide a wide variety of good handlers and blindingly fast beauties.

Try and say what is remarkable about Need for Speed: Undercover and you might be left lost for words. It is missing to more fun aspects like the drag racing and drift competitions that brought a nice balance to the gameplay of the previous titles. There is not really much in the game that sets the world on fire. This may have sounded like a laundry list of complaints but at the bare bones of it all there is a competent racing game. There are plenty of thrills and spills to be had and you do get a taste of the brand new Nissan 370Z. It’s not enough though to make up for all the lack of inventiveness that has seen the series grow stale.

Need for Speed Undercover is a vast improvement on Pro Street but sadly now it feels more like a reliable old Volkswagen Polo instead of the Porsche GT-3 that it aspires to be.