Game Need for Speed: Undercover
For
the most part, the reaction to the last few Need for Speed games was
the same: "Why aren't they more like Need for Speed Most Wanted?" "Where
are the cheesy cutscenes and the over-the-top cop chases?" It seems as
if EA heard those cries, because for better or for worse, Need for Speed
Undercover feels like Most Wanted.
In Undercover you play the role
of...wait for it...an undercover officer. Along with agent Chase Linh,
played by the attractive Maggie Q, your job is to take down a group of
street racers that have somehow become involved in an international
smuggling ring. The story is told via campy cutscenes that fail to
capture the charm of Most Wanted thanks to uninteresting characters and a
predictable plot. Having a story provides incentive to make it through
race after race, but the whole "this is cheesy so it's cool" thing feels
kind of forced this time around.
It won't be easy, we'll have to use our powers of acting to take down the street racers.
Like many other Need for Speed games,
all of your racing will take place on the streets of a fictitious
open-world city--here it's the Tri-City Bay area. You'll start with a
lousy vehicle, but it won't be long before you're able to snag a pink
slip to a nicer ride. As you progress you'll earn cash, which can be
used to unlock (50+) new vehicles from manufacturers such as Nissan,
Dodge, Cadillac, Ford, Porsche, Lamborghini, BMW, Aston Martin,
Mitsubishi, and more. If you're into tuning individual aspects of your
ride or purchasing individual parts you can do that, but if you're not
into tinkering you can purchase an upgrade package and be on your way.
Not only will you earn money for
winning an event, you'll earn driving points for dominating
it--basically beating it really, really bad. You can power up a number
of your driving attributes, but they don't have a noticeable effect on
how your car handles. As long as you drive fast you'll probably
dominate, but there are occasional races where you'll totally obliterate
the time needed to dominate an event, but you'll still lose to the CPU.
The game also encourages you to drive with style and drift, draft, and
drive really close to other cars, but other than increasing your nitrous
there's little to gain from doing so. That said, the new J-Turn
mechanic, which lets you bust quick 180s, is invaluable when chasing
down rivals or evading the cops. You'll use it because it's useful,
though, not because it gets you heroic driving points.
The cops are back in full effect in
Undercover, and for the most part, their return is welcome. The
challenges in which you must ram and take out a certain number of police
cars are great fun, as are the challenges where you must cause a
certain monetary sum of damage. Of course, you don't always have to ram
cars to take them down; you can also run into log trucks, electrical
towers, billboards, and more to leave a little surprise for your
pursuers. It's too bad that some odd quirks hamper the cop chases. The
environmental hazards that you can unleash certainly look cool and are
effective, but quite often you won't see any police cars get hit by the
objects, yet when the cutscene ends the cars are trashed. Sometimes you
won't have to do anything at all to evade police--the game says "go" and
you stay still and nobody finds you. Cops are capable of laying down
spikes, but you can go the entire game without them ever doing so. The
biggest problem, however, is that the cops don't do much other than bang
on the side of your car and yell at you, so if you last long enough
they sort of fade away on their own. This makes the chases less
challenging than they could have been and also makes them feel
artificial, like you're just fulfilling some sort of time requirement
until the game decides you've done well enough to escape.
Undercover isn't just about messing
with the Man. There are events where you need to maintain a lead for a
specific amount of time or get a certain distance ahead of your
opponent. Sometimes you'll have to shake the cops while trying to keep a
stolen ride in pristine condition, and there are checkpoint races and
circuit races as well. There's not a whole lot that's original here and
the races are generally extremely easy--you might not see another car
for an entire race once you've cleared the starting line. They're
difficult on occasion, but this is usually because of the occasionally
choppy frame rate, which makes the otherwise great-handling vehicles a
chore to drive when it rears its head. What's odd is that there's really
no obvious reason for the game's sometimes poor frame rate; the city
doesn't look much different than those in Carbon and Most Wanted.
You might not want to crash into a cop car in real life, but here, it's all good.
That
said, the game does do a few things very well. The online cops and
robbers mode, where the robber tries to pick up money and take it to a
drop-off point while another person plays the cop and tries to ram them,
is quite a bit of fun. But mostly what the game gets right is its
pacing. The races are short--sometimes as short as 20 seconds, and
almost never longer than five minutes. Another cool thing the game does
is it lets you instantly jump to the closest race by pressing down on
the D pad. If you want to find a specific event you can press up and
you're taken to a GPS map, where you can instantly go to the race of
your choice. It'll save you a lot of needless backtracking, and combined
with the short races, makes sure that Undercover never gets boring.
If you're one of the many people who
loved Need for Speed Most Wanted, flaws and all, you'll find a lot to
like in Undercover. It's not very original, but there's no denying that
it's just good fun to run from the cops and wreak havoc on a city in the
process.
Recommended System Requirements for Need For Speed Undercover-
OS: Windows XP/Vista
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD 64 X2 5200+ or AMD Phenom
RAM: 2GB MB RAM or higher (Windows Vista requires 3 GB RAM)
HDD: 10 GB free disk space or more
Graphics: 512 MB or higher (Pixel Shader 3.0, PCIe only)
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Minimum System Requirements for Need For Speed Undercover-
OS: Windows XP/Vista
CPU: Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz or AMD Athlon 64 3500+
RAM: 1GB MB RAM or higher (Windows Vista requires 2 GB RAM)
HDD: 10 GB free disk space or more
Graphics: 256 MB or higher (Pixel Shader 3.0, PCIe only)
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Screenshot:
Genre: Racing | Style: Street racing 3D | Release: 2008
Link Download IDWS
