Solid Block of Ise

(Warning: foul language ahead)

Now, I’m a fairly big fan of the Need For Speed-franchise of games. I bought the very first one back in 1995 and enjoyed it immensely. I enjoyed NFS: Carbon a while back.

After that, it kinda went to shit. I briefly tried Pro Street, released a year or so ago and felt that the NFS-concept once again was dead. The last time I felt this way was when Underground was released back in 2003, and the concepts of street-racing was applied to the franchise. Sure, I admit that the franchise grew back to my liking, and I actually enjoyed Carbon quite a lot.

ProStreet though was a failure with me, and apparently also with the other gamers since EA decided to ditch that concept and return to the illegal street-racing style that has been with the games since 2003. This installment is called Undercover.

So, is it any good?

No, it’s complete and utter crap. If you’re thinking of spending money for it, don’t. If you’re thinking of pirating it, don’t. Just save yourself the irritation, time and effort and play Fallout 3 instead.

I’ve been struggling to find something I like about Need for Speed: Undercover. I can’t think of anything. Admittedly I haven’t played it for long, only about two hours. Yet in this relatively short span of time it has managed to annoy me to no end.

Let’s start with the graphics. Undercover sports a new engine. It looks like a huge pile of cow-dung with graffiti spraypaint on it. If you’ve never seen a car-game before it’ll blow your socks off, everyone else will be annoyed with it. It looks plastic, it looks fake. It’s crammed full with specular highlights, blur and all manners of gaudy crap. It’s so bright and shiny you can barely see your own car, much less the goddamn road in front of it. It blows effects in your face at a speed that even a hummingbird would have a hard time following. Hell, even your damn map is shiny! You can’t see where frick you’re headed because THE MAP HAS GLARE ON IT! Everything in the game seems to be painted with the brightest, most obnoxious colors available within the laws of physics.

And despite all this shock and awe the game is spectacularly ugly. Buildings look like they were built by a five-year old with Lego. Everything looks plastic, as if the models used were bought at some cheap-ass website selling 3D Studio Max models created by a trained team of chipmunks.

Add to this that everything that isn’t a car whizzing past at a million miles per hour looks like it was plucked from Indianapolis 500: The Simulation. That means that menus, transitions, fricking everything else looks like it was drawn in EGA-graphics. It’s ugly as hell. I guess EA thinks it’s The Bomb as far as style goes, but it’s just plain ugly.

Ah, yes. The menus. The game has some horrible hodge-podge of a menu system that is completely illogical. Add to this that the game installed in Swedish on my computer - and there’s no way of changing the language. So us who live in Sweden get the really dorky translations done by some Singapore wage-slave on way too much caffeine. But the menus are completely illogical. You have to start a game before you can change settings, for example. This means that you have to sit through the crappy intro-movie and do the crappy introductory race before you can even change your damn resolution! Or any other changes for that matter.

Which brings me neatly to the story of the game.

Pardon my french, but who in the blue fuck came up with the story for this game? It’s like an even dumber version of The Fast And The Furious. If you can imagine a dumber version, personally I find it incredibly difficult to imagine. But somehow EA managed to do it. And they paid Maggie Q a lot of money to “act” in this thing to make it, you know, more real. The full-motion cutscenes are amazingly stupid and add nothing to the “story”. Oh right, these can’t be skipped either. Because they’re so cool and awesome you want to watch them. Yeah, the writers of this turd wasn’t equipped with huge egos in any way, shape or form.

UPDATE: I forgot to write about the physics and the handling. There is none. The very first Need for Speed-game had more realistic physics and handling than this game. The cars are as responsive as bricks, and there’s no accounting for what make or model of car you’re driving. The Lotus Elise (in reality a very nimble and aggressive racer) handles like a Ford Mustang. It takes forever to accelerate, has awful cornering and a tendency to skid and oversteer. I guess the upside is that a Mustang actually handles better in-game than in real life, since in the game it handles identically to the, well… the Lotus Elise. I’ve seen wet soaps thrown in a shower that had better handling than most of these cars. Now, I know that NfS long ago ditched the concept of racing-simulation and focused on arcade-style racing instead, but why does that have to mean physics from a early ’90s arcade-racing game?

And then there’s the myriad of minor annoyances. Such as the game taking an hour to install. Or how you can change the setting of your “TV” in the menu. Could it be any more of a console-port? They even kept the freaking language. Or how you can’t change your name - at least not as far as I could find after digging around in the vast and confusing menu-system. Maybe there’s some OCD-afflicted teenager out there who figured it out, but I didn’t. So you’re known simply as “Player” throughout the game. Or the soundsystem that is so oddly designed it’ll make your ears twist themselves into donuts. Supposedly it has some Creative HD Audio Bla Bla Bla Crap to make it sound good. All I know is that no matter what car you drive it sounds like a combination between a steamliner and a chainsaw, and the engine always sounds like it is placed about six feet behind the actual car you’re driving. And this complete and total feeling that whoever developed this thing had like five or six teams doing different things and none of the teams ever communicated with each other. They just developed their little piece of the pie, and then some final team just slapped everything together and sent it for shipping. There’s no coherence in this game, no glue that holds the concept together. No style, no substance. Just another McGame produced by EA.

So no, this is not a good game. It’s a huge pile of cow-manure. It’s console-crap ported to the PC, without the stuff that makes console-games fun.

On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is Crap and 10 is Awesome I give this game a solid -5 score.

UPDATE2: If you want a REALLY good racing-game that is everything Undercover isn’t, I strongly recommend Race Driver: GRID. It’s a beautiful game, probably one of the best-looking racers I’ve ever seen. The physics in the game are excellent, every car handles differently and very realistically. Which is good to point out - GRID focuses on realism. If you’re used to NFS-style arcade physics at first you’ll be struggling since GRID puts it’s weight on realism. There’s no NOS-button you can push to go faster. The only way to go faster is to become a better driver. But it’s completely worth it. It’s incredibly fun, and you can race around several real-life circuits. When you’re sitting in the Audi R10 TDI doing 420 km/h down the Circuit de la Sarthe you know you’ve succeeded. The game is stylish in every aspect, it’s fun and it’s also easy to tailor to your level of experience. If you want to ease up on the difficulty you can do it - if you want a completely realistic touring-car experience you can get that too.

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.