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.