The Song Remains The Same - Need For Speed Undercover

Author's Rating:

Pros: The track design is the best in NFS since Underground 1

Cons: The "stories" in NFS games are getting more and more silly

The Bottom Line: 
I could make a joke about Maggie Q being under the covers. But I'm above that. *snort*

Author's Review
After a year off to make the more realistic and focused Need for Speed Pro Street, EA has returned the franchise to its familiar open-world cities that have existed since Need for Speed Underground 2. This latest NFS is dubbed Undercover, an attempt to mix a non-racing story into a racing game...shoehorned and awful, sure, but it's an interesting attempt. Like most other NFS games since Most Wanted, Undercover is competent, but not memorable; it offers solid action and a nice collection of vehicles, but the formula has grown overly familiar and stale. With so many other quality racing games on PlayStation 3, there's really no reason to give Undercover a run unless you've played all the rest. It is competent – lengthy, controls pretty well, and has a nice variety of events and awesome track design, but long-time fans are sure to be disappointed at the lack of ambition, especially after EA went out of their way to mention the longer development cycle due to splitting up the NFS team into pairs.

Be the law, break the law
In NFS Undercover, you're – guess what? - an undercover cop given a mission to infiltrate the local illegal racing scene, since it has ties to an even more illegal car smuggling ring. Your only contact is Chase Linh, played by Maggie Q, who gives you directives and information as you weed out the criminals. The vibe feels similar to the movie Fast & The Furious, especially if you point out the very high concentration of dorks trying to act cool. The mission to infiltrate involves doing lots of racing and even giving the police fits, allowing the plot to seamlessly blend in with your average racing game. Does it make it any more interesting? No, but at least it does a good job of hiding in the background until you want to advance it. You might not want to though, since it's pretty ridiculous from start to finish, waiting until the very last mission to reveal the ultimate plot twist, which itself is easy to spot for miles. Yet that's just par for the course in this very bizarrely designed racer.

I fought the law, and the law won...because I am the law
Most familiar Need for Speed racing staples have returned for Undercover. Circuit races, sprint races, and checkpoint time trials take up the bulk of your time. Unfortunately, drift events and canyon racing are absent, though there is one story relayed race that's called a “canyon” race, but not in the same fashion from NFS Carbon. In its stead are highway challenges, where you go one-on-one on a busy freeway. The goal is to either be ahead when the time runs out, or get so far ahead that the race is forfeited by the loser. The catch is the whole thing is through first-person perspective, and there's no changing it, a bummer for those of us who prefer the traditional bumper camera. While traffic is usually sparse in normal races, they really bump up the car count on the highways, making for some very hairy races, though they tend to be very trial and error based; more than once I only won because my opponent slammed into a bus and got way too far behind to catch up.

With the new emphasis on the police a la Most Wanted, there's missions that involve creating chaos with the cops. Thankfully this time they're less rigid and mostly optional; aside from doing them in the first part of the city, I almost never touched them again and still finished the game. These missions involve escaping the cops in a certain amount of time, causing as much damage as possible before escaping, and smashing up squad cars. Like Most Wanted and Carbon, being caught can be a problem; get enough markers and the car is impounded, and if you don't have any other cars...it's game over. Through the game are also story missions to progress the plot, which tend to be regular events with story characters. Early on for instance, a more suspicious member of the local car thieves challenges you to a highway race; beating him makes the guy almost comically devoted to you. When the time is right, Chase will tell you to strike, and the game becomes Burnout. Well, not really, but your goal is to smash up a criminal's car which leads them to their arrest. Sadly, this doesn't involve racing a cop car.

The Undercover map, dubbed the Tri-City area, is huge. It's a shame that they almost completely eliminate the use of it. While driving freely, you'll see events pop up on the screen. Press down on the d-pad and you'll warp right to the event. Otherwise, if you check your map of events, merely selecting one does the same thing. It's nice, but the game has no way to actually drive to the starting point of a race either. So why bother with such a big city? This could have easily been accomplished using a menu-based system. That said...the map is the bright spot of the game. Most of the courses are awesome, some of the best track designs the franchise has seen since maybe the first Underground game. Tons of shortcuts, alternate paths, tricky corners, and sections where you can blow the doors off...I was surprised how much effort went into all this. Eventually the AI matches the track quality. Early on the races are insultingly simple; it isn't until the second area opens that you start getting tricky opponents with better cars. The final area of the game presents some epic challenges requiring all your skills and vast knowledge of shortcuts and better routes...and many of them are off the beaten path.

So yeah, the racing component, the core of the genre, is actually pretty good, and the game will take a good 10-15 hours to complete...and after that you can go back to do unfinished races and improve times in checkpoint races and the like. So what's the problem? Mostly that this is the fourth Need for Speed game in the last five years to use this same open-world formula. Pro Street, though not great, was a nice departure from these faux-attitude soaked racing games with the same kind of plot and events. They just didn't spend a lot of time thinking with a new perspective, instead merely remaking Most Wanted, the game Undercover most feels like. A first-timer might find a lot to like, but those people should be investing in either Most Wanted or Carbon due to their much lower price and higher quality (yes, even Carbon is a better game). Those of us crazies who buy every Need for Speed game though...well at least Need for Speed Shift is offering a brand new perspective.

Miami days...and apparently nothing but days
Another strange thing with NFS Undercover is the visual performance in the opening city. Based on Miami, it's sunny and washed out, which is one thing...but the frame rate is jumpy and scratchy, leading to a game that has untimely moments of skipping around and causing chaos. The strange thing is the later portions of Tri-City is that the other sections don't have the performance problems and are a lot more stable. Not a solid first impression, who knows how many people will stop before seeing things get straightened out. One nag would be the lack of a day/night cycle; if you're doing an open world game in 2009, it really needs this...even Midnight Club LA went this direction. Otherwise, the graphics are decent enough, with good if familiar car designs that take visible damage a la Pro Street. The cutscenes from the story are Sega CD era FMV, which is equal parts awesome and cheese throwback, with some awesomely bad voice acting to round it out. Still no Razor Callahan cameo though. The soundtrack consists of lots of tunes, but very little is familiar, and the PS3 version doesn't have custom soundtracks enabled.

The Closing
Like every Need for Speed since Most Wanted, Undercover is a good game. Not a great game, not a memorable game...just a good game. You won't feel offended to play through it, but you likely won't be going back to it once you complete the story. There's nothing wrong with a competent game, though compared to say Midnight Club Los Angeles, it pales and should be an option exercised when you run out of other racers to play. EA has seemingly gotten the memo about constantly rehashing the Underground formula; the upcoming Need for Speed Shift has taken a very different, more authentic direction without the story fluff they've been pushing for all these years. But being a good game in a world where there's a lot of really bad ones...at least Undercover can claim that.