No one likes this one. The 3rd release in the NFS series on the 360, 2008's undercover feels like a product of the yearly release franchise that NFS became. Taking notes from the popular most wanted series, the game tells the story of some cool underground racing scene, featuring stylised real life actors in the cutscenes. This was actually my favourite part of the game. It's so painfully 2008 that it hurts and masochists like me will feel right at home in this classic cringe fest. On to the racing itself, well it's not good. We have a very bland open world map. It looks very low res and ugly and doesn't feel like it was designed with racing in mind. These type of maps work in games when there are lots of nooks and crannies to explore, secrets to find and jumps to try out. Undercover's map isn't like this. It is empty. Racing around the same lifeless map is extremely tedious and made worse by the cop chases. How can I hide from the cops if there is no where to hide? The game also introduces some destructible elements to the map, which while nice, are heavily underutilised. The game is also 100% an arcade racer, so keep that in mind. Really can't recommend this one.

Need for Speed Retrospective #12

I feel like I can't say much about Undercover that hasn't been said already. It's definitley no underrated raw diamond. It's incredibly ugly und incredibly unfinished. The visuals hurt your eyes and the handling and physics are simply non-functional.

The most amazing thing about this game is how many elements are just hanging in the air. The leveling system does nothing and the open world is just there. You can't even access the races from it properly. Clearly, the one-year release schedule was no longer going to fly for games of this scope. Please give developers more time and resources.

Game #140: Need for Speed: Undercover

It's not a bad game like the fans make it look like but it clearly lacks the charm or quirk other NFS games had. This is the most ordinary racing game I've ever played. But still, it's not a bad game.

6/10

After ‘Need for Speed: ProStreet’ didn’t quite hit the mark with their new action driving fanbase they had accumulated since Underground due to its more realistic driving, EA went back to the streets with ‘Need for Speed: Undercover’.

Underground is much like Most Wanted and Carbon with a few of the race types tweaked a little. It’s back to police chases to progress the story, an open world and cheesy live action cutscenes. What does make a very welcome comeback is the good soundtrack, not quite Underground’s standards in my opinion but still great with such artists as Pendulum and The Prodigy. One unwelcome edition to the game, which is just very EA, is a pay to win mechanic. If you cannot afford a car or upgrade in the game you can trade Microsoft Points for them. I wouldn’t give them a penny in a million years for this. Luckily, EA had promotions with T-Mobile at the time who handed out codes to be used in the game for free cash. As they can be easily found on the internet you better believe I used them.

EA Black Box, who developed the game, went for a cinematic look to the game as though you were playing a film that would have likely starred Jason Statham. There is a beige cinema filter over the top and the graphics settings even encourage you to enable cinematic mode on your TV with a warm colour palette.

The story is that you are an undercover policeman (whose face is never shown for some reason) looking to infiltrate an underground street racing gang over a stolen car. There doesn’t seem to be much story cutscenes making it a compelling plot, just short cinematics which don’t really amount to much. As a player you’re left to your own devices which makes it feel like a lonely experience. The loading screens even mention when you’re undercover you’re on your own. The structure of the gameplay is just: race, race, race, cutscene, race, race, new car, race.

The car handling reminded me very much of Most Wanted. Really hard to make small corrections to the trajectory of your car, lots of wheel spinning and cars acting like they’re on ice. While driving and not touching the joystick, my car would just randomly veer off to the left without prompting. I tested my joystick in other games and it showed no signs of stick drift. Other people online seemed to be having this issue too. Due to the bad handling of the game I would tend to focus on cars which had a high handling rating like the Audi TT. The physics as well could be bonkers at times. During later races in the game, your opponents will have zero issue in bulldozing their way into you and either send you spinning or push you sideways around the track. If you try the same tactics as them, your momentum will be killed and they won’t even flinch.

Some of the later races or “master races” (surely they could have thought of a better name than that) can be impossibly hard to beat. When I first started the game I was easily gaining so much distance ahead of the other racers I thought “yay no rubberbanding”, I quickly realised how wrong I was when I progressed further into the game. Even if you see the other racers all hit an NPC car and cause a massive pile up, sometimes within seconds someone will overtake you at the speed of light and take corners as though they are on rails. You will be trying races over and over just to beat them. You just have to hope that the fastest car in the group hits an NPC car or barrier that slows them right down. Towards the end I just did all the police chases as those are the ones that progress the main story as the races were just becoming too frustrating.

For once I actually enjoyed the police chases, it was satisfying to crush police cars by dropping objects on them or even completing a police mission within seconds due to clever tactics. Sometimes I would fail the police missions as no police cars would show up causing my time to expire. One thing that happened on more than one occasion was being seconds away from evading the police only to be spotted by a helicopter and for a whole new chase to start all over again.

One important element of this game is still the upgrading and modification of the cars. As I genuinely hate the look of garish car designs with silly body kits and tribal decals down the side all I would do is colour all my cars purple and give them a spoiler. The upgrade system is not too complicated if you use the quick upgrade system like I did or if you want to fine tune your car to your liking you can do that too.

‘Need for Speed: Undercover’ is one of the lesser enjoyed games by the fanbase but I found it to be okay, yeah it lacked character and just seemed like the game was put together to pander to an audience. I enjoyed it but not enough to want to play it again as the driving experience and handling was too stressful for me as I never felt in full control over my own car.

Have a lot of good memories playing this game, so was good coming back from a nostalgia point-of-view.

In terms of gameplay however, controls are rather 'rough' on keyboard/mouse and one of those older games/ports where controller isn't necessarily supported as button layout isn't defined in settings or on-screen. I prefer the soundtrack in this game compared to a lot of the newer ones, good that the songs are based on the type of race you choose (i.e. sprints/circuits tend to differ from checkpoints, - highway battles has it's own unique track etc). Doesn't feel as repetitive as hearing the same music on loop.

Overall though, a good game to come back to once in a while if you can handle older, janky controls.