Need for Speed Undercover (Xbox 360)

Electronic Arts tries to sell you a lemon, and then keeps bugging you for money
12/1/2008 7:34 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 3

The graphics are terrible, with cars that mysteriously appear in the middle distance, either singly or in tiny groups. There's no sense of traffic beyond the occasional vehicle dropped in your way. This city is mostly a set of roads with a few rare shortcuts. Undercover carries over the "Pursuit Breaker" system, whereby you can drive through clearly labeled points to drop stuff onto the road, which magically disables nearby police cars. This is usually some sort of construction apparatus, and it invariably looks thin and contrived. You'd think EA used some 90s-era Tony Hawk engine.

The real surprise with Need for Speed Undercover isn't necessarily how terrible it looks. That's to be expected, given that it's a multiplatform game obviously built to share resources with a PlayStation 2 version. What's truly surprising is how poorly it runs. The frame rates are uneven and the draw distance is pathetically close. It's been a long time since I've seen a game that both looked this dated and ran this poorly. The developers should be ashamed foisting this on anyone with a next-generation system. There's a reason we aren't playing on PlayStation 2's anymore.

Why we drive

The gameplay progression would be pretty good if it didn't force you to repeat races until you come in first place. You get absolutely nothing for not finishing first place in a race. This will mean a lot of grinding in the harder races until you can pay for the horsepower to brute-force your way through them. And some of the races, like the highway battles, have more to do with blind luck than skill. Will that bus jog left as you're trying to pass it? At least the artificial intelligence doesn't get an artificial speed boost to keep up with your car. Except for the supercops, the other drivers seem to play fair most of the time.

Instead of focusing all the upgrades on the individual vehicles, your driver persona also upgrades as a set of skills (never mind that these skills are actually car parts). It seems a little silly to finish a race and be awarded +3% induction or +1% brakes, but as you accumulate enough improvements, it'll presumably be easier to beat the challenges that force you to use a specific car. Beat these challenges to move through the various milestones in the storyline, which include unlocking different regions around the Tri-City Bay. Yeah, it's called Tri-City Bay. The only more generic name for this unremarkable place would have been Generic City, USA. To its credit, it's big and wide-open from the very start, but there's no reason to go anywhere until you unlock the challenges specific to each area.

You'll also progress along a reputation system that determines when the storyline challenges will be available. You'll get reputation multipliers by building up an "In the Zone" meter when you drive with precision. Driving recklessly will build up "heat" for a particular car, which makes it more likely the police will chase you, forcing you into one of the "evade the cops" challenges. Since you can essentially teleport to any challenge, running into the cops on the open world is rarely an issue. However, as the game progresses and your heat level rises, the police will sometimes interfere during races. The idea is that heat will encourage you to switch cars from time to time, letting the heat die down on a particular vehicle. Alternatively, you can customize the appearance of a vehicle, essentially paying to reduce its heat. EA's "autosculpting" system lets you shape individual parts of a car, but it's hard to tell what's going on without tinkering with a bunch of slider bars and then applying the results before you even know how they'll look.