The cops can be relentless and it's up to you to cause as much damage as possible and look out for hazards to drive through in order to slow them down and get them off your back. The police chases are fairly difficult and go some way towards justifying the open-world environment. On the flipside, Undercover's city setting comes into its own with the cop chases and outrun missions. Instead, Undercover opts for arcade handling, which, while responsive and fun, makes racing at high speeds very easy and means players with average ability will be ahead of the pack after the first couple of turns. If Undercover were a simulation-style racing game, the ease of races might have been avoided with the need for careful driving and tactical tuning. The races continue to make even less use of the city surroundings by taking away most of the traffic and consequently the sense of danger in street racing. Circuit races construct walls to stop you making a wrong turn, and the sprint races - races from A to B - generally only ever contain one or two shortcuts that are so minimal they are of little consequence. The races themselves also negate the open-world structure as there is generally only ever one route to take. Undercover takes the complete opposite approach by not allowing the player any freedom at all to organically discover races and secrets. One of the criticisms of another open-world racer like Burnout Paradise - a title this will no doubt be compared to - was that you had to keep backtracking to start a race. However, despite its size, there's little need to explore Tri-City as all of the challenges and missions can only be initiated by pressing down on the D-Pad or selecting them on your map. The size of Tri-City is to be applauded and it offers up a generous number of challenges to keep players entertained. The game takes place in a huge open-world environment that is split into four districts and connected by long stretches of highway. Undercover continues like this throughout it successfully implements one feature only to bungle another.įor those of you who are prepared to ignore the rather mundane storyline, Undercover's gameplay does no better a job in convincing you that Black Box has advanced the series. The beginning of Undercover is symbolic of what's to follow - a fairly exciting opening playing sequence, followed by a polished, well produced cut scene, with a script that makes Command And Conquer's writing look like the work of an Academy Award winner. The protagonist is informed that in order to bust a gang of criminals, he's going to have to enter the street racing scene, gain the trust of its major players and then take them down. This is immediately followed by the first of many awful cut-scenes starring Hollywood hottie Maggie Q - your police superior. The game starts off promisingly enough, with a cinematic highway chase culminating in your car smashing through a police barrier. Unfortunately, developer Black Box is still no closer to finding the perfect Need For Speed recipe. In terms of carving out its own identity, the latest Need For Speed continues the franchise's experimental tradition, with Undercover adding some previously seen features and taking away others. Even little things like the time of day in which races take place, car damage and levels of customisation have been chopped and changed more times than a WAG's hairstyle. A few titles have allowed players the freedom to cruise the city and choose races, while the rest have been more rigid in terms of structure. Some Need For Speeds have incorporated police chases, others haven't.
Some titles have been racing simulators, while others have been all about arcade thrills.
Also available on: PS3, PS2, PSP, Wii, DS, PCĭespite its twelve year history, the Need For Speed series has never really been able to settle on what kind of racing game it wants to be.