Graphically NFS Undercover is a giant steaming pile of crap, however......
At first I was so appalled to be playing something that look like it came from the ps1 era that I didnt think I would continue playing the game at all, but the mechanics were still the same and even improved over previous NFS games. In the end I think the game delivers another great experience and I've been having lots of fun with it. I think it easily beats Most Wanted to be the best NFS game to date.
There are a couple of new race types. Timed Circuits is where you just endlessly race around a track against other cars and when the timer runs out you have to be in first position. Highway Battles are like outrun events where you have to take the lead and then get far away from the other guy except that unlike outrun where you can go anywhere highway battles have set courses. Its hard to win on mostly straight roads and highway where the computer can go pretty fast so you either have to get lucky and hope they wreck into something, or that you are in first place when the timer runs out.
You also get a cop car added to your cars eventually. You can not customize it or change it but when you drive it you start pursuit missions where you have to chase after criminals. They get health bars and you have to slam into them until they are disabled and then move on to the next guy. You can make alot of money in these events. A couple of things prevent this mode from being the best it could have been. First you have a time limit on catching each criminal. Second when the game is on easy they are totally brainless. They spawn right near you and come straight at you. You barely have enough time to build up the speed to ram them. If they would ditch the timer and make the bad guys way more evasive the mode would have totally owned.
Theres the normal crap from most wanted: circuits, sprints, tollbooths, outruns, bounty challenges. Another new mode is Driver. You drive someone elses car and do various objectives like smash up stuff or lose the cops but you have to watch the health of your car while doing so. Usually they end by having to break away and get to a garage or checkpoint.
We get carbon's autsculpt and paint schemes which is cool because autoscultped wheels are sick.
Another new thing to the game is the "in the zone". Basically its a meter that keeps track of your style points(drifting, near misses, etc). As the meter fills up it increases this multiplier. Your "In the Zone" multiplier controls how quickly your nitrous and speedbreaker meters fill up. The cleaner and more stylistic you drive the more nitro and speedbreaks you will get. its a cool concept and it works alright.
Now for all the bad news....To match the horrable graphics is a the messed up audio. I dont know what they did but now you have to crank the sound way up to hear anything. The actual music tracks arent that bad, mostly rock and a couple of punk, no rap or hip/hop that i have heard. I have mostly all the tracks turned on(hate punk). My favorite song in this game is one from NIN. It gives the game this really sad/depressed feeling. Makes it feel dirty and gritty.
The speedbreak is kind of glitchy. Speedbreak is where you slow down time and gain added grip and mass to your car. Letting you smash through things more easily or taking corners at insane speeds. Once I tried to use it going around the corner and it like pushed me through a corner that was temporarily blocked off and reset my car in the middle the road at a dead stop... Another time I was in the middle of a highway battle and turned it on and instantly won the battle(the timer had not run out).
To go along with that the mini-map kinda sucks and is glitchy. The mini-map is zoomed in to tight in most situations not letting you see far enough ahead to know about upcoming turns. But besides that, the highlighted roads sometimes blink and move around.
The highway battles are also kind of glitchy. I will be in the lead and the guy will be a good distance behind me but the meter that tells how much distance is between us will flash from green(in the lead) to red(behind) even though are positions never change.
The world map kinda sucks to. It does a really nice job of letting you filter out different kinds of races and letting you jump to them or activate a gps to them. My problem is when you just try to move the cursor and highlight stuff on the map manually the cursor has a snap function that prevents you from just freely looking at parts of the map you want to look at.
Oh this game carries over one slight thing from Pro Street which is nice and thats the Owned/Dominated mechanic. The better your finish a race the more money and rank you get. Rank is something you build up each race, once it reaches certain points you get rewards. A perma upgrade to a stat of the car you were driving at the time(not all of them, i dont think), or other things like new max level for your In the Zone meter. I dont think the game actually cares about your Rank levels though. I seems like its just totally dependant on finishing key races.
What sucks is that you never get told when there are new cars or new performance upgrades or new parts for your car.
Oh one last sucky thing about this game is that they reused street sections from most wanted. Alot of key features got reused. Its like they picked up sections and just moved them around and changed them graphically. I dont really mind this aspect. Hell it would be killer if they got to a point where we the player got to lay down street sections how we see fit and make our own unique city layouts. It just adds to the overall lazy half-assed feel of the game from the developers. And thats not just a ps2 thing. This is clearly a NFS:Most Wanted 2 or expansion but they charge us full price like we are getting a brand new game. Thats pretty lame.
Ooops forgot to talk about one more crappy thing. This one is pretty major. When you drive through pursuit breakers it almost always kills your speed which is completely stupid. You should be able to just fly through them and keep your speed up but they have these area's of effect and apparently the developers couldnt keep your car from getting hit by them either. That really sucks because it really takes away from the pusuits.
I never talked about pursuits... If you have your game set to easy its basically impossable to get busted. If they trap you somebody usually moves and gives you an opening to escape and the bar takes forever to fill up. My only complain here is that later in the game your heat level rises insanely fast. You dont get to spend any time in the low heat levels smashing the living hell out of crappy cop cars. You just instantly jump to 4-5 and have to deal with heavily armored cars and crap which are impossable to smash up yourself. They usually die from ramming each other or hitting walls, or from pursuit breakers. Thats just not as fun as plowing through them yourself.
Overall and despite all the glitches I think this is an improvement over Most Wanted and although it pains me to say it the best NFS to date. Gameplay trumps graphics. If I dont get an xbox 360 for xmas, I will definately try to hunt down a copy of this for my ps2.
PS: EA why have you abandoned the mechanics you made in Underground?? Where the hell are my neon lights?? Where the hell are my suicide doors?? Where the hell is my car's star rating and photoshoots?? And most importantly where the hell is DRIFTING!!!!! Ugh and please please bring back the cool chase mode you had at the end of Carbon. That would make a much better highway battle system. First one guy leads the race for a time limit and you have to follow as closely as possable and then you switch places and do it again and see who did it best. I think vinyls need to be better organized to. Split them up by theme, but also by placement(hood,side,body). I really think you guys need to makes "Stitches" its own theme and start creating all kinds of vinyls for that!!
I would say im looking forward to the next one but looking at how glitchy and recycled this one is I dont know if you guys have it in you. This was suppose to be your break out onto the new consoles.