This year is all about face-offs. FIFA 09 versus PES 2009. Rock Band versus Guitar Hero World Tour. Need for Speed Undercover versus Midnight Club Los Angeles. EA has the honour, in our opinion, of coming up trumps in the first two stoushes. The third however? Well, you can’t win ’em all.
Need for Speed: Undercover is clearly an attempt to cash in on the success of 2005’s Most Wanted after ProStreet flopped with critics and fans. The game itself is as straightforward as you’d expect; race, come first, win cash, buy new cars. The underlying story is you’re an undercover cop working for Maggie Q, the crazy kung-fu bird from Die Hard 4.0. It’s pretty weak. The Fast and the Furious-lite.
Everything seems to work as it should – the racing is fast and frenetic; the sense of speed is swell and the cars look mostly rad. It ticks most of the boxes it ought to in order to get by.
The biggest problem with Undercover, and it’s a fundamental one, is that it’s lazy.
The new Heroic Driving Engine isn’t too shabby – we like the way it feels and we love being able to pull off incredible 360s at 200km/h on the freeway. The cars seem suitably weighted and handle well. We’re also suckers for good presentation, and Undercover also performs swimmingly in that department. The stylish opening sequence, for instance, smacks heavily of Michael Bay – you know you’re not about to have your intellect tested but you do begin to expect action a-plenty (presumably of the high-octane variety, with two or three exclamation points for good measure!!!).
No, the problem is that most improvements that have occurred in Undercover will either be difficult for your average gamer to notice or fail to add anything noteworthy to the experience. What we’re left with is a lazy game we have the sinking suspicion we’ve played before.
Undercover features a great range of cars, but it’s a simple cut-and-paste job from ProStreet and the DLC cars that followed its release. There just isn’t enough new here, and you’ll likely have driven nearly every ride on offer here in a previous iteration of the series. Unsurprisingly, there’s no local content either – no W427, no F6, not even a Pontiac G8. Pick up a phone guys, we make cars down here. Boo.
