Need for Speed: Undercover Review

AU$60...why did I pay that much for this game...
Personally I think this game is worth $10 at most. I started the game with good thoughts about Most Wanted, it being the best NFS game in the EA franchise. I was yet to discover that this game was atrocious! The game was severely buggy, with long loading times while driving, therefore making it hard to drive, and with this came bad resource management. I had all setting on low and it running in 800x600 and my computer still couldn’t cope, and this in on my new 3.2GHz Quad Core with a 3870X2. Now with these settings, the cars looked like they were from Need for Speed High Stakes, the world was shadowless, the lines on the road were pixelated, and everything was a huge, unpolished mess, like my room at the moment.

I did some reading and many other reviewers have thought the exact same thing. Most complaining about the poor fps performance, loading while within a race, and number of bugs within the game (an example they mentioned which I saw as soon as I got into the game was cars that only had the wheels, the body was invisible)

It was not until I went onto the EA NFS website that I found a patch. This fixed a few bugs, and the fps issue for me. Now don’t think I thought this was ok, because why the hell would you release such a poor game, with so many bugs, and poor system resources management (e.g. epic LAG!!!) into the market. Why should people pay $60+ for a game that doesn’t function? It’s just not fair to the consumer! What made them release this game so quickly, did EA give black box studios a restricted time frame for the game, did it reach its time limit and then whatever they had they just threw it onto a disc and stamped a price tag onto it? EA, have you heard about giving the developer an extra month for beta testing, I mean, common! The game had a Performance issue, I would have dreaded running this on your minimum system requirements.

Ending my rant...

Ok, so I installed the patch and found that the loading bug had been fixed, and the performance issues had been somewhat fixed.

And WALLA! I was actually having fun, I was able to play the game without getting frustrated. But a terrible sense of da ja vu was in the air. Am I playing Most Wanted again??? People who play this game will find it to be Most Wanted, with quite similar graphics, a larger world map, bot cars with car damage, and maybe 2 new types of racing that are very similar indeed (Highway race where you have to get 300m in front of your opponent, and what seems to be getaway where you flee from the other car and have to stay in front for 1.5 mins). Now this is a good game, but it could have been better. As I said before, I believe Most Wanted is the best game in the series so far. It did everything Undercover does and it did it better. It seems that the developers where in such a hurry to get the game out that they forgot to do anything new and exciting with it, hence it being such a failure compared to its predecessors. The world map is huge, which is what Most Wanted needed as I played the game so much that I memorised the whole map because the game was soooooooo good and so immersive. But Undercover doesn’t know what to do with it. This is really the only positive I can give it, except for the fact that Undercover has the Bugatti Veyron in it, but game play isn’t very challenging, the graphics are meh for this day and age, considering I have the boxes of both Most Wanted and Undercover sitting on my desk and the screenshots look like they came from the same engine.

Actually the game is challenging, but that because there is a bug with the collision detection in this mode, where you have to smash the crap out of other cars. Let me tell you how frustrating this part was. The first guy I took out was fine, I rammed into him 5-6 times and he died and finished within 3 minutes, then the second guy came along right after, had to smash him a billion times because my hits refused to register, leading onto a really long smashing sequence which went on for literally 40 minutes, not to mention that I had 2 thugs on my tail trying to stop me. But this is when the game makes the worst mistake in the world! Because there where 2 thugs chasing you, they now know who you are, so in another 2 chase things you have to take each one down. So two more 30 minute chases came about. Think I am done? OH NO I’M NOT!! During one chase with the final Thug, which this was 20 mins into the chase, finally dies...BUT my game does not register that he has been defeated, goes into third person camera, and follows the other car, therefore i cannot see my car, and the camera follows the thug while I crash into a wall, mission failed, I lose, I rage, closing the game and dying a little inside knowing that I just wasted 30 minutes of my life, knowing that I will have to waste another 30 trying to do it again. I did however manage to do it again in 5 mins due to some lucky hits that did register.
Now one thing this game, like Most Wanted again, does is the cinematic things in between missions. They are ok, the acting is crap! But amusing. It gives the game some sort of meaning, but falls flat on its face due to crap game play, and the way of progressing is just continuing to race. They become an annoyance because it breaks up game play and leads to those stupid chase and destroy things. There isn’t much positive about this game, as it does thing exactly the same as Most Wanted and fails miserably.

I’ll sum up my thoughts of this game.
This game makes me cranky! As you can tell. I do not recommend this game to anyone! This is due to it being incomplete, and Most Wanted is probably available in a game bin somewhere for like $10, and would recommend that as you will have a much better experience with Most Wanted than you will with Need for Speed Undercover. Most Wanted just did everything better, and runs on almost every pc. The performance issues may be better on a console, so if you need to get this game, make sure you get it on Xbox or Playstation.

Now I need to get hit by a car, assuming it isnt lagging due to performance issues and doesnt glitch through me.

I am sure I'll be fine though cause if it does hit me I will be fine because it probably won't register