It’s strange when talking about arcade racing games to have to factor in a storyline and how it holds up as it would to a more traditionally story orientated game such as an action adventure. However, the Need for Speed games have long relied on story as something to set them apart from the pack, and this reliance means a bad story will not make the game stand out.
Need for Speed: Undercover is the latest in the series and unfortunately it has a bad story. A really bad story. It tries to be a gritty undercover cop story with twists and turns, but ends up being a poorly acted, badly scripted mess. There is very little focus on translating the story into actual game play and at times this does make it seem like the story should have been thrown out and it tell you just complete events until you have done everything.
The actually racing is very solid, and provides some pulse pounding, adrenaline charged action. The licensed cars in the game provide some great racing machines and shows you just how fast 230 k/ph really is at times with great tunnel vision inspired motion blur at the edges of the screen.
Your mission in the game is to take down a local street racing gang which are supposedly involved in international smuggling. This being called Undercover, the local PD do not know anything about you and the only one who does is Agent Chase Linh, played by hottie actress Maggie Q. In order to take down said gang you must take part in various race types strewn about the tri-bay city area to increase your cash and ‘Wheelman Rep’. Cash provides you the ability to buy and upgrade cars, while your wheelman rep moves the ‘story’ along with each level up.
To enter a mission you must press down on the D-Pad, which kinda defeats the purpose of putting this game into an open world. Lots has been made of Undercover being a return to the series highlight Most Wanted’s style of play, and while this is true, in Most Wanted you have to physically drive to a location to be able to activate a race and it meant you learnt the streets of the city and its little nooks and crannies while just tooling around. Undercover completely negates that and means that it can become a real trial and error for each race, but then this is helped somewhat by a strange difficulty level that can mean standard races are incredibly easy at times while a simple case of catch up to the guy in front (also know as highway battle) can prove to maddeningly difficult, even when taken on straight after the easy race.
The local Police make a welcome return here, however, and when they chase you it can provide some of the games most thrilling moments. However, that strange difficulty raises its ugly head once again here, and means that while the longer it takes you to evade the police the better they become, calling in a helicopter, SUV’s and even the Porsche armed feds to take you down, you can either outrun them within thirty seconds or just have them send about twenty cars crashing into you. Rather than make the AI better with each successive round of cops, the game tends to simply pour more at you, ramming you into walls and other traffic with no regard for anything other than stopping you in your tracks, which is rarely achieved anyway.
The online component is a fairly standard affair with the various race types providing what Undercover does best: thrillingly fast paced race’s, even if you can flip your car end over end three times after a slight snag on a barrier and still maintain a lead.
Need for Speed: Undercover is a solid racer than provides moments of true heart pounding speed and thrills. Several minor glitches and a story that fails to embrace the cheesy over the top nature that should embody this type of game mar an otherwise enjoyable title. A return to form this is, but it should and could have been so much better than this.
Danny Moore
