Need For Speed Undercover

From Porsche-only oddities to hotpursuit hijinks to last year’s streetracing-goes-pro departure, the Need for Speed series has been all over the place. Undercover returns this popular racer to familiar ground: a sprawling city ruled by street racers and enthusiastically policed by a whole lotta cops hell-bent on catching them. It’s almost too familiar, really — Undercover tries too hard to mimic Most Wanted’s successful formula, but it also comes up with a few surprises that’ll keep devoted fans happily fleeing the law.

Our favorite is a new Live multiplayer mode, Cops and Robbers. In it, you divide into two teams, and the crooks drive around looking for the money. Once they find it, the cops launch a full-on ramming assault to prevent them from carrying the money to a drop-off point. Both sides rack up points in timed rounds, then you switch sides. The bumper-cars mayhem is really fun, and Black Box did a good job of crafting maps that are well-designed to accommodate the chaos.

The game’s other highlight is the wild variety of events you tackle in your attempt, as an undercover cop, to infiltrate gangs by…y’know, racing. Yes, that means there’s a big overarching plot, and yes, stories and racing games never mix well. Undercover is no exception. The in-game opening is actually über-awesome in a Bruckheimer kind of way, but after that, the game switches over to live-action clips that bury themselves in their own cheesiness. They might not have bombed if EA had stuck with CG, but on film, they come off as the kind of sketchy C-grade fodder that even Cinemax would have second thoughts about airing at 3 a.m. Fortunately, you can button right through them and get down to the action, which is Undercover’s finest hour. Its races aren’t just sprints or circuits (though there are plenty of those); you’ll test your pedal mettle at everything from Outruns (pass your opponent and hold the lead for a minute) to Highway Battles (weave through highway traffic to open up a 1,000-foot lead) to Cost to the State, where you have to damage a ton of public property and then evade cops that buzz after you like angry hornets. That’s just all kinds of fun.

The driving style is Need for Speed at its arcadey-est, so expect those finger cramps that come from only rarely releasing the right trigger. That’s all well and good, but it does start to feel a bit mindless when you eventually notice that the game has no difficulty options...which is just a horrible decision! No game can be tuned to work perfectly for every single gamer, and we didn’t get a whiff of challenge until we opened up Level 6 events. Before that, we usually had the lead within the first 5 percent (!) of the race, then sleepily glided through the rest of the turns, alone and unchallenged. Another unfortunate pacing issue also crops up around Level 6 — that’s when you’ll start to wonder if you’ll ever open up the other parts of Undercover’s city. The answer is yes, soon you will. But by the time that happens, you’ll have raced every inch of the game’s opening stomping grounds so often that you’ll be begging for some variety in the scenery.

So Undercover feels a bit off-balance. Its bright spots, like the anticipation it builds for unlocking all the ridiculously fun race types, is dragged down by the drudgery of its slow-paced progression. A good time can be had, but only if you’re patient…and a really big fan of Most Wanted.