The genre of racing games has literally traveled humongous distances right from its inception and any wannabe racer feels incomplete if he has to skip a holiday season sans his yearly dose of Need for Speed.
Electronic Arts, the world’s milkiest cow in the business of videogames, have yet again supplied the junkie with his creamy layer of cars, cops and robbers with the latest iteration of the game titled Undercover.
The game, however, defies all the odds this season to emerge as a sub par experience slandering EA and Criterion’s credibility in churning out a franchise as coveted as Burnout: Paradise.
NFS Undercover brings players into a corrupted city filled with gangs who are seemingly addicted to racing. As an undercover agent assisted by Maggie Q (the Asian chick from Die Hard 4.0), you have to crackdown and cleanse the plethora of crimes that have infected the Tri City area.
The game boasts of 55 licensed vehicles and the all new unreleased “Nissan 370Z” to tinker around the world. Players who have done their duties in Most Wanted will feel right at home in this title. The first few moments of the game have been directly lifted off from Most Wanted, with the player’s car being ripped off by the authorities, during a heist (Most Wanted had a race where the player gets the pink slip and has to part with his dear car).
The rest of the game rests as mixture of real life cutscenes with really cheesy acting and a heroic driving engine, which touts a lot at speeds of 180 mph, but manages to fumble every inch of the exhilarating experience that made a majority of the series so addictive.
Need For Speed Undercover’s races consist of highway battles, sprints, circuit races, outruns and the good old checkpoint bag to send the familiar feeling of adrenaline for Need For Speed fanatics. As the player gets noticed on the streets, he is contacted for jobs which include stealing and delivering high end cars, shaking off pursuit cars and finally beating the top racer for the concerned area to progress on with the story.
Most of the objectives are provided to the player via his GPS, even though the world boasts of no boundaries, most players will resort to directly transporting themselves through the menu rather than driving through the empty lifeless city whose inhabitants have disappeared ever since the fallout occurred.
The game also incorporates a “Photo Mode” ever since photography has been made a rage in the console universe with Halo 3. The gripe with this mode is that the camera is fixed at the centre of the car, allowing for very little freedom to click photographs, and thus all my dreams of pursuing a career as a “fast and furious journalist” have been thwarted.
EA Black Box seemed to have taken special pains in constructing a world which looks and feels sub par than Most Wanted and puts the entire franchise to shame. The framerate drops quite frequently in an empty and boring environment. In-game shadows and decals have been poorly done, the players will find it mighty annoying when the framerate compromises when the car has absorbed damage to give it a battered look.
The AI programmers have seem to have gone on strike, and its results are quite imminent in NFS Undercover. No race feels a challenge barring a few highway chases, once a player has managed to gain an edge during a race it will be a rare occasion he/she will find himself losing the race. The game also removes the split-screen mode present in previous version leaving players with terrible broadband connections high and dry, an online mode has been added to compromise the situation with scoreboards for number junkies.
The Final Word on Need For Speed Undercover: Electronic Arts managed to change a lot of views this year with superb titles like Dead Space, Battlefield: Bad Company, Burnout Paradise and Mirror’s Edge but the greedy little piggy wanted more this holiday season and this it where it faltered with its incessant want for global domination. Need for Speed: Undercover will leave majority fans disappointed and dejected and will reinstate the familiar feeling of franchise being overmilked to the point of no return.
Developer: EA Black Box
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platforms and Prices:
- PlayStation Portable: Rs 1599.
PC :Rs 999.
PS2: Rs 999.
Xbox 360: Rs 1999.
PlayStation 3: Rs 2499.
Graphics: 2/10.
Gameplay: 2.5/10.
Sound: 5/10.
Budget Pocket: 1.5/10.
Overall (not an average): 2.5/10.
(Need For Speed Underground Xbox 360 Version Review).
- By Neelesh Mukherjee