Well, allthough I have written something that might resemble a review in my previous post, I have written a review on Gametrailers.com that is somewhat superior to the one I had posted here, so I’m just going to copy-paste it on here as well. Even though I scored the game a bit higher on that review I still think that this review is superior to the last one. So here you go.

EA seems to have listened to a lot of the criticism on Need for Speed Pro Street by taking this game back to the streets, but on the PC this is not as good as it sounds. I hope for console owners that their versions are at least not as bad as the PC version.

Like Most Wanted, Undercover is played during the day. Even though the effect of driving straight into the sunlight looks nice and fairly realistic being blinded and such it’s annoying to no end, because you can hardly see where you’re going. You can sometimes see the sun move sideways for no reason that I could explain and shadows of stationary objects seem to folow your car when you pass by. Shadows pop up out of the blue almost everywhere in the levels. The reflection on the cars as well as the road reflections flicker from time to time, but it’s even worse that the entire screens flickers occasionally completely blocking your view. The cars look nice and shiny though, but even that is nothing special as we have seen that before in earlier Need for Speed games. I even dare to say that the cars used to look better in earlier games in the series. Added to all this, the city you’re driving in looks empty, dull, bland and boring.

And now I have yet only spoken of the graphical nuisances. Let’s continue with the gameplay. Well, this is also bad. I mean, if a game looks bad because of glitches and bad design it can still be saved by solid gameplay. Even though Need for Speed Undercover has some nice gameplay elements, nothing seems to work out just the way it should. The races are easy, short and nothing coming even close to a challenge. The short races can be rectified by saying that they are so short to keep the game at high pace, which is true more or less, but it’s the longer races in the previous games that really did it for me as it can be tough to stay focussed for a long time at very high speed which also adds to the challenge. The is one race type though that would have been really cool if the controls weren’t as bad as they are and that’s the out run. In this race mode you have to either stay in front of your opponent for a set period of time or get in front at a set distance and you have to do this on a very busy part of the high way at high speed. These races are actually quite fun despite of the horrible controls. All the other races are more of the same as seen in previous games in the series. Another fun addition are the so called jobs that you have to complete to get further into the story. In these jobs you have to get a car from point A to point B without crashing it and while avoiding the police for example. This all sounds like great fun, but in practice it’s annoying and frustration to no end. The horrible controls added on top of the bad handling of these special cars cause you to crash into about everything, including police vehicles. They won’t easely bust you, but they will total your car and then you’ve failed anyway. Added to that is that in one mission I’ve played it was completely impossible to avoid the police as they had a helicopter in the air that would magically pop up right above you and it even sees you while you’re in a tunnel or otherwise obstructed from sight from the air and the car is too fragile to trigger persuit breakers and not fast enough to outrun the police and you can tell by this that it’s at least very frustrating to play this job.

I was talking about bad controls earlier, let me explain this. In Need for Speed Underground, Underground 2, Most Wanted and Carbon the controls were responsive and quick and the cars handled quite well with the few exceptions of the really crappy cars. In Pro Street the controls felt somewhat unresponsive at times and most cars handled really bad. This was probably due to the fact that EA didn’t raelly know whether to make this into a racing sim or an arcade action racer and then created something in between that didn’t really work. Need for Speed Undercover is an arcade racer for sure, but the controls don’t occasionally feel unresponsive, the feel unresponsive, slow and inaccurate all of the time. I play racing games with my Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2 with two analog sticks that work great with any racing game I own, except for Need for Speed Undercover. It feels like it’s steering has an on/off switch instead of smooth analog control. It’s either steering to the max or not steering at all and this makes it nearly impossible to keep your car in a straight line on the road. Especially in those fun out run races this gets really annoying as you often have to push your car through tight spaces between the other cars on the road and you will almost always hit them, simply because you can’t get through in a straight line causing you to bounce in between them. So that’s why I say that the controls are bad, or even horrible.

I haven’t talked about the sound yet except for the music. Well, the sound is nothing special. The crashing sounds don’t give you the feeling of a crash, more that of some grinding or scratching and the engine sounds aren’t really top of the line either. Some cars sound like lawnmowers.

I also had a few crashes, a few times during races and once while I was pimpin’ my ride. Not as many as I’ve seen in some other games before and I’m not going to bitch too much about it.

The bottom line is that this game is very, very bad. The bad controls, tons of graphical glitches and the boring design all add up the how bad this game really is. Some ideas are nice, like the out run races and the story jobs, but it all doesn’t work out and this game is by far not what it should have been. The music is nice though and the cars look nice. And now I haven’t even mentioned the terrible live action cutscenes. They aren’t so bad that it’s good, no, they’re so bad, going past good back to bad again.

Graphics: 3
Lot’s of glitches and boring design.
Sound: 4
Nothing special and some cars sound like lawnmowers
Music: 7
Good soundtrack adds to the racing feel, if it was there
Stability: 7
I had a few crashes, but not enough to be really bitchy about it
Gameplay: 1
Can’t score it any lower. Horrible controls, races and other events are either too easy or horribly frustrating.
Story: 1
As far as a racing game needs a story, this one has a story that isn’t just bad, it’s also being told in a very boring and annoying way through horrible cutscenes.

Score: 3.8 (average)

So do yourself a favor and don’t buy this game. Don’t even bother downloading it, it won’t be worth your time and it’s illegal on top of that.

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For everyone who thought Need for Speed Pro Street was bad… This is even worse. And that said is actually allready enough. The Underground series has been going from Need for Speed Underground up to Need for Speed Carbon. Then came Need for Speed Pro Street in which they tried out something new by taking to street cars to the legal organized racing events. A nice twist, but it didn’t work out. The controls were bad lingering between arcade and realistic driving and that doesn’t work too well combined with horrible driving physics which makes it even a challenge to keep the cars on the road in a straight line. Even though Undercover has dropped the whole “let’s try to be somewhat realistic” driving in favor of total arcade driving in which you barely ever take your finger of the gas, keeping your car in a straight line on the road is near impossible unless you happen to exit a corner just right to put you in a straight line on the road. Personally I think this is unforgivable as the controls are by far the most important aspect of a racing game. Graphical glitches can sometimes be forgiven is the rest of the game is solid, but that is most definitely not the case with Undercover. Need for Speed Most Wanted and Carbon featured cheesy, yet amusing live action cutscenes to tell the story. The story was never very impressive, neither needs it to be impressive, but the cutscenes added to the fun of playing through the single player carreer mode. The cutscenes of Undercover are a whole different story. Where the cutscenes of Most Wanted and Carbon were so bad that they were good, I’m going to have to use a quote of one of the best movies on this planet to describe the quality of the cutscenes in Undercover. It’s a quote from the movie Ghostworld: “This is so bad it’s gone past good and back to bad again.” And yes ladies and gentleman, that is an accurate description of how bad the cutscenes in this game are. They are cheesy in the purest sense of the word and not ammusing or fun to watch at all. Even worse is the fact that you can’t skip those annoying race intro’s either. They are fun the first time, but they get old real fast and you want to skip them and start racing allready, but no, you have to watch them over and over again which is especially irritating when you have to retry a race if you fail and trust me on this one, this will happen more often than you’d like. Most races are easy, very easy and maybe even too easy, but occasionallly there are races that are critical to the story and somehow these races can get pretty difficult in a way like this; your opponent sticks to your bumper and you make one error and you’ll lose. It’s impossible to overtake him again and you have to restart to be able to win the race. Or you have to deliver a car undamaged to the other side of the city without cops on your tail while the cops have a chopper in the air that even sees you when you’re in a tunnel and then there are so many cops on your tail that losing them is impossible when there is also still a chopper in the air that always sees you no matter where you go. Added to that is that the car is totalled in no time thanks to the horrible controls of this game. This causes these so called “jobs” to be no fun at all and the best way to get past them seems to be cheating. But I haven’t yet searched for any cheats or trainers to remove the cops or make the car invincible or something to get past those annoying jobs.

Ok, that’s enough whining about the gameplay, how this game is unplayable and all, but there is more bad stuff going on in this game. One of them is the graphics. Yes, the graphics suck. On the screenshots and in the official movies it all looks great. And it does look great in game too, if it weren’t for the tons of graphical glitches in this game. A shadow of a stationary object following your car, random flickering reflections, total screen flickering occasionally, shadows popping up out of the blue, other objects popping up out of the blue and so on. By all these things I can tell that this game was released far before it was done and for console owners I hope that those versions at least don’t suffer from these graphical glitches as they most likely can’t be patched to clean this mess up. On the PS3 it would be possible to patch it as all PS3’s have a hard disk, but not all XBox 360’s have a hard disk, so patching a game on that system is impossible. And for PC gamers who have bought this game I hope that these problems will be cleaned up with a patch in a near future as well as a tuneup of those horrible controls.

Talking about the controls, I use a Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2. I don’t have the Logitech tool installed as it’s not available for 64 bit Vista so the rumble function doesn’t work. So I can’t tell if the game makes good use of that, but it surely doesn’t make proper use of analog controls. It feels like there is an on/off switch for steering even when using an anolog stick for steering. It’s  either no steering or steering all the way, nothing in between.

There is something good too though. You don’t need to drive around the city all the time to find the races, just jump to an event you like using the map, saves you a lot of time backtracking and such. The cars look good, just like in any other NFS game. They look detailed and they can be customized with spoilers, hoods, exhaust tips, body kits and that jazz, but the game even managed to crash when I changed the rims a few times. And it even crashed directly to my desktop without any error messages or something, it just stopped working as Windows calls it. And ofcourse this game has a nice musical score. The music quality is good and the songs really add to the experience, just too bad the experience is so horribly awfull.

The bottomline is, stay away from this game. When you see this game in a store, pretend it’s not there or something, even when it’s in a bargain bin, it’s not worth whatever you would pay for it. I give a 3 out of 10, because the cars look good and the music is nice, that’s it, no points for gameplay and polish, because this game plays very bad and is completely unpolished overall. This game sucks. Maybe I should do a videoreview of this game sometime, just to show off how bad it is.

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