Need for Speed is a racing game series, a street racing game series to be more precise that involves fast, cool-looking cars and street racing crime syndicates. If any of this sounds familiar, then you've probably played these games before. I haven't so this is new to me. So now that that's out of the way, let's actually talk about this game, Need for Speed: Undercover.
Imagine for a moment that all the cars in the world were not made of very malleable chrome and other metals, but were instead made out of diamond. Now imagine that there are no pedestrians whatsoever and in fact no people - all the drivers are robots that are one with the car, made of diamond. This is very much what Need for Speed Undercover feels like. When you crash into another car, whilst going 165 mph on the back country roads, the car you crashed into with go flying away 50 feet to the side, losing all forward momentum and sometimes even gaining several seconds of airtime, while you lose maybe 5mph off your speed. If you crash into something that looks unstable, like for example a giant statue of an ice cream man or a prone support on a highway sign, then instead of your car crumpling into a heap, that structure will instead fall into a million pieces upon your pursuers as you drive away unharmed and unaffected by the crash. In fact, running over street signs, telephone poles, and fire hydrants will rip them from the ground as you lose no momentum.
Of course, this is a racing game, so this can all be forgiven in exchange for the fun of the game. The things that actually matter, like the racers and the cops, actually do put up some resistance to your reckless driving. However, I still say that crashing headlong into a wall should cause a little more damage to the car than simply causing it to go from 250mph to 0 in less than a second. The driver flying through the window would certainly be a sight to see.
My next point is on graphics. Undercover has come out for everything with a screen, and the one I'm reviewing is for the Wii. While the Wii is usually noutorious for terrible graphics, the Wii version of the game has pretty good graphics. The exterior of the cars actually reflect light as they drive around; the blinking red and blue lights from police cars can be seen in real time off of other cars (and not just your own car, though that is the most obvious). The scenery looks faboulus, especially when flying through froested areas and back alleys. The only problem is loading times. In cluttered areas like villages or cities, the buildings load slow and you can come across situations where your driving into what looks like a sunset in the distance when suddenly a building pops up right in front of you and you realize the road curves around the building, causing you to crash into the building that suddenly appeared. A couple times, the game deposts you prematurely onto a road that has not yet been loaded for whatever reason. This will result in your car floating above a strange black-green void for several seconds while the game hurriedly tries to load the scenery around you, eventually loading the road through your car and the car has to "jump" back up onto the road.
In fact there are a few other things that QA should have found during development. There's this reproducible bug with the Aftermarket menu: You've just finished a awesome persuit involving destroying about 100 police cars and you got a lot of money that you want to spend. So you buy a new car and you head to the aftermarket menu to see how cool looking you can get your car. Well I hope that you saved, because the game freezes to the point where you have to hard reset the Wii. However, once you load up the game again, you can easily browse the aftermarket without fear.
A few other bugs include a missing cop car ("I gave you a cop car to use in these missions!" I go to find it and it isn't there), faulty cop collision detection after cutscenes or resetting, stupid police AI (such as one of the cars used to box you in backing off and letting you through), and the fact that you can't use the control stick in the menu and that menus reset to the first item when they shouldn't (which isn't a bug, but more of a design flaw).
However, despite all this, Undercover is a really good game. The difficulty curve is defiantly present and good, starting off weak for the new players and getting progressively harder to challenge the hardcore and experienced players. I was "dominating" early on enough while still getting my butt kicked when I deserved it. And later in the game, Lamborghinis start popping up to royally kick my tush and keep me motivated to buy faster and faster cars. The fastest cars are locked early in career mode so the difficulty curve is preserved, even for those who save up enough to buy such cars. The higher missions reward more money so you can get those faster cars faster.
The controls are tight. Undercover can be played with any control scheme Nintendo can think of (including Wii Wheel - which for those who didn't realize it before is just the same has holding the single Wiimote sideways). My preferred control was Wiimote-Nunchuck. The controls were laid out nicely enough, though having the trigger button (B) as accelerate took some getting used to after Mario Kart. You can switch control schemes at any time and the game won't begrudge you for it. Nitrous and Speedbreaker are mapped to convent places, as you will be using those a lot: Nitrous along straightways and Speedbreaker around tight corners or over hills you don't want to fly over (because Speedbreaker, which the game tells us during one loading screen, increases you mass and slows down time, which in my opinion is a contrived reason for the team to not fix the physics engine after the slow down).
The "Tri-city" is expansive and un-repetitive, but not big enough to not know generally where you are. The free-roam mode blends seamlessly with missions to the point where loading time is cut down only to loading cinematics and the safe house. You can jump to the next race when you're bored of free-roam, or are tired of being hunted down by cops, or you just want to look at the loading screens (because there are hot chicks and tips on them - yes, guys, there are tips there in case you didn't notice).
The cutscenes are all professionally shot with real-life actors, so even on the Wii, the immersion isn't slashed because of horrible polygonal people. This might also be the reason for the lack of pedestrians. In fact, there are only two human models in the game: a cop and "you" (with face pixilated out) for the cutscenes on the rare occasions where you get busted.
The sound is also a great plus for the game. There must be about 30 different engines recorded on the game disc, and all of them sound like 300 horses. Once you tone out the sound of the engine, the game features several music tracks that play randomly in the background. There doesn't seem to be any way to control what plays or when, but it doesn't matter much because there's nothing catchy among them and there's nothing really grating either. The police commentary (a stable of any police-fleeing game) is great to listen to as well. The dispatch actually states the brand and color of the car you're driving (though their definition of "blue" could use some work and the Lotus doesn't seem to be in their book-o-cars, as they brand it simply a "sports car"). And the cops respond quickly to what you're doing ("He's doubling back!" "He just rammed me!" "This guy's trying to drive me off the road!"). There's even a few deadpan lines in there: I once drove straight into a guard rail after a bought of indecisiveness and a cop responded contemptuously, "This guy can't drive, we've got him...". The number of saying is vast enough that it doesn't get old for a while. Then after it gets old, you can just respond to the TV with "duh!" when a cop informs his buddies that he's just been rammed.
Once you finish the career mode, you can try out the Challenge Series, which has you do new routes or missions with a given car (instead of your own pimped out one). While these tracks are fresh, the difficulty could be ramped up quite a bit more (it is called the "Challenge Series" after all - it should be challenging). And while the Silver and Gold circuits gave me a challenge, I still finished first on the first run, with a 12 second split time (time between you and the first npc car). These seem to only lengthen gameplay and they serve that purpose only to a point.
Finally, a multiplayer mode is available to challenge your friends. I personally hate knockout races, because it leaves the knocked out players sitting around while the other players keep racing. Cops and Robbers mode, on the contrary, is exceptionally fun to do, however you can only play it with three or four players, not two. For two players, they have a chase mode, in which you can race around the Tri-City hindered only with time (as opposed to closing off an arena or track) with one player as the Cop, the other the Robber (the only downfall is that there are few possible starting points, which makes gameplay repetitive). Unfortunately, the multiplayer mode could have been better, with more races or types of events.
All in all, I would certainly recommend this game to people who like fast cars, like racing without hindrance, or simply like cool cars (like my brother, who knows cool cars better than the back of his hand and beat this game in a week). It is a great game, despite the occasional bugs. A definite buy.
Reviewer's Completion: 42% Career Completion | 12/34 Challenges Completed
Reviewer's Brother's Completion (watched him): 75% Career Completion | 0/34 Challenges Completed
Imagine for a moment that all the cars in the world were not made of very malleable chrome and other metals, but were instead made out of diamond. Now imagine that there are no pedestrians whatsoever and in fact no people - all the drivers are robots that are one with the car, made of diamond. This is very much what Need for Speed Undercover feels like. When you crash into another car, whilst going 165 mph on the back country roads, the car you crashed into with go flying away 50 feet to the side, losing all forward momentum and sometimes even gaining several seconds of airtime, while you lose maybe 5mph off your speed. If you crash into something that looks unstable, like for example a giant statue of an ice cream man or a prone support on a highway sign, then instead of your car crumpling into a heap, that structure will instead fall into a million pieces upon your pursuers as you drive away unharmed and unaffected by the crash. In fact, running over street signs, telephone poles, and fire hydrants will rip them from the ground as you lose no momentum.
Of course, this is a racing game, so this can all be forgiven in exchange for the fun of the game. The things that actually matter, like the racers and the cops, actually do put up some resistance to your reckless driving. However, I still say that crashing headlong into a wall should cause a little more damage to the car than simply causing it to go from 250mph to 0 in less than a second. The driver flying through the window would certainly be a sight to see.
My next point is on graphics. Undercover has come out for everything with a screen, and the one I'm reviewing is for the Wii. While the Wii is usually noutorious for terrible graphics, the Wii version of the game has pretty good graphics. The exterior of the cars actually reflect light as they drive around; the blinking red and blue lights from police cars can be seen in real time off of other cars (and not just your own car, though that is the most obvious). The scenery looks faboulus, especially when flying through froested areas and back alleys. The only problem is loading times. In cluttered areas like villages or cities, the buildings load slow and you can come across situations where your driving into what looks like a sunset in the distance when suddenly a building pops up right in front of you and you realize the road curves around the building, causing you to crash into the building that suddenly appeared. A couple times, the game deposts you prematurely onto a road that has not yet been loaded for whatever reason. This will result in your car floating above a strange black-green void for several seconds while the game hurriedly tries to load the scenery around you, eventually loading the road through your car and the car has to "jump" back up onto the road.
In fact there are a few other things that QA should have found during development. There's this reproducible bug with the Aftermarket menu: You've just finished a awesome persuit involving destroying about 100 police cars and you got a lot of money that you want to spend. So you buy a new car and you head to the aftermarket menu to see how cool looking you can get your car. Well I hope that you saved, because the game freezes to the point where you have to hard reset the Wii. However, once you load up the game again, you can easily browse the aftermarket without fear.
A few other bugs include a missing cop car ("I gave you a cop car to use in these missions!" I go to find it and it isn't there), faulty cop collision detection after cutscenes or resetting, stupid police AI (such as one of the cars used to box you in backing off and letting you through), and the fact that you can't use the control stick in the menu and that menus reset to the first item when they shouldn't (which isn't a bug, but more of a design flaw).
However, despite all this, Undercover is a really good game. The difficulty curve is defiantly present and good, starting off weak for the new players and getting progressively harder to challenge the hardcore and experienced players. I was "dominating" early on enough while still getting my butt kicked when I deserved it. And later in the game, Lamborghinis start popping up to royally kick my tush and keep me motivated to buy faster and faster cars. The fastest cars are locked early in career mode so the difficulty curve is preserved, even for those who save up enough to buy such cars. The higher missions reward more money so you can get those faster cars faster.
The controls are tight. Undercover can be played with any control scheme Nintendo can think of (including Wii Wheel - which for those who didn't realize it before is just the same has holding the single Wiimote sideways). My preferred control was Wiimote-Nunchuck. The controls were laid out nicely enough, though having the trigger button (B) as accelerate took some getting used to after Mario Kart. You can switch control schemes at any time and the game won't begrudge you for it. Nitrous and Speedbreaker are mapped to convent places, as you will be using those a lot: Nitrous along straightways and Speedbreaker around tight corners or over hills you don't want to fly over (because Speedbreaker, which the game tells us during one loading screen, increases you mass and slows down time, which in my opinion is a contrived reason for the team to not fix the physics engine after the slow down).
The "Tri-city" is expansive and un-repetitive, but not big enough to not know generally where you are. The free-roam mode blends seamlessly with missions to the point where loading time is cut down only to loading cinematics and the safe house. You can jump to the next race when you're bored of free-roam, or are tired of being hunted down by cops, or you just want to look at the loading screens (because there are hot chicks and tips on them - yes, guys, there are tips there in case you didn't notice).
The cutscenes are all professionally shot with real-life actors, so even on the Wii, the immersion isn't slashed because of horrible polygonal people. This might also be the reason for the lack of pedestrians. In fact, there are only two human models in the game: a cop and "you" (with face pixilated out) for the cutscenes on the rare occasions where you get busted.
The sound is also a great plus for the game. There must be about 30 different engines recorded on the game disc, and all of them sound like 300 horses. Once you tone out the sound of the engine, the game features several music tracks that play randomly in the background. There doesn't seem to be any way to control what plays or when, but it doesn't matter much because there's nothing catchy among them and there's nothing really grating either. The police commentary (a stable of any police-fleeing game) is great to listen to as well. The dispatch actually states the brand and color of the car you're driving (though their definition of "blue" could use some work and the Lotus doesn't seem to be in their book-o-cars, as they brand it simply a "sports car"). And the cops respond quickly to what you're doing ("He's doubling back!" "He just rammed me!" "This guy's trying to drive me off the road!"). There's even a few deadpan lines in there: I once drove straight into a guard rail after a bought of indecisiveness and a cop responded contemptuously, "This guy can't drive, we've got him...". The number of saying is vast enough that it doesn't get old for a while. Then after it gets old, you can just respond to the TV with "duh!" when a cop informs his buddies that he's just been rammed.
Once you finish the career mode, you can try out the Challenge Series, which has you do new routes or missions with a given car (instead of your own pimped out one). While these tracks are fresh, the difficulty could be ramped up quite a bit more (it is called the "Challenge Series" after all - it should be challenging). And while the Silver and Gold circuits gave me a challenge, I still finished first on the first run, with a 12 second split time (time between you and the first npc car). These seem to only lengthen gameplay and they serve that purpose only to a point.
Finally, a multiplayer mode is available to challenge your friends. I personally hate knockout races, because it leaves the knocked out players sitting around while the other players keep racing. Cops and Robbers mode, on the contrary, is exceptionally fun to do, however you can only play it with three or four players, not two. For two players, they have a chase mode, in which you can race around the Tri-City hindered only with time (as opposed to closing off an arena or track) with one player as the Cop, the other the Robber (the only downfall is that there are few possible starting points, which makes gameplay repetitive). Unfortunately, the multiplayer mode could have been better, with more races or types of events.
All in all, I would certainly recommend this game to people who like fast cars, like racing without hindrance, or simply like cool cars (like my brother, who knows cool cars better than the back of his hand and beat this game in a week). It is a great game, despite the occasional bugs. A definite buy.
Reviewer's Completion: 42% Career Completion | 12/34 Challenges Completed
Reviewer's Brother's Completion (watched him): 75% Career Completion | 0/34 Challenges Completed