Years ago, I picked up Need for Speed: Undercover for my Wii. At the time, I haven't played any of the previous entries in the series, but I knew NFS had a good track record up to that point. After the first mission, I never progressed in the story anymore; there were just too many games I wanted to play instead. Every once in a while, I would insert the disc into my Wii, do a few races, and drive around the city, but I really don't remember doing much else. Because of that, I decided to put the game in my backlog so I could finally finish it. So, find your car keys (they're between the couch cushions), and let me tell you about this game!
Our cast of characters consists of Chase Linh: the FBI agent who put you on the case. Lt. Keller: another officer there to help you with the syndicate case. Even if he's barely shown... Hector Maio: a gang leader. Zack Maio: Hector's angry brother, who is also in his gang. Carmen Mendez: the player's designated love interest who's involved with Hector's gang. GMAC: a former police lieutenant now leader of his own street racing gang. Rose Largo: some goth chick who either looks mad or smirks at you in cutscenes. After she takes a liking to you, she gives you "hot car" jobs. Finally, we have Chau Wu: the leader of the syndicate we're investigating. I left out one character simply because he doesn't have much bearing on the plot.
The gameplay for Undercover is about what you would expect for a modern racing game. You race, and if you're not doing that, you can drive around the city. Or don't because there isn't much to see. There are no collectibles or other incentives to encourage the player to drive around Undercover's open world. I don't really blame the developers, though. Especially when the graphics look dated for the time. If you don't believe me, look at this game and compare it to how Burnout Paradise and Midnight Club: Los Angeles look. Both being games that were released in the same year as this. There's really no reason to have an open world anyway since there's both a button that takes you to the next event and the ability to jump straight to any available event by using the GPS map.
There are 187 events you can play in all. In a failed attempt to not make the gameplay too monotonous, there are different types of events divided by category. For the race events, there's "highway battle," where you have to stay ahead of another car by a few thousand feet. These events are set in bustling streets, so you have to avoid the traffic because getting hit just once can set you back long enough for your opponent to outrace you. This is also the only event where your car can be totaled. "Sprint," where you have to stay in first place until you reach the finish line. "Circuit," a regular multi-lap race. "Outrun," where you have to stay in the lead of your opponent until time runs out. And "checkpoint," where you have to make it to each checkpoint before time runs out. Out of these five race events, only highway battle and checkpoint really offer much of a challenge. They were almost always challenging to complete because of the traffic and time limits, while everything else was so easy that it bored me. One highway battle did seem almost impossible for me that I just avoided playing that event. Once you get in first place in circuits and sprints, your opponents seem practically nonexistent. I only really had a problem in one or two races, and that was it. And I'm not an expert driver by any means.
Other than race events, there are wanted events. These include "cop take-out," where you have to destroy a recommended quota of cop cars, "cost to state," where you have to deal as much collateral damage to reach the set amount before time runs out, and "escape," where you just have to escape the cops. Doing events will earn you money and raise your reputation. When your reputation level gets high enough, you can advance in the story. Either by unlocking new cutscenes and/or jobs. You can also spend your money on new cars and upgrades, but I only did the latter since you get a free car with pink slips. Doing well in races and events level up your "wheelman skills." Wheelman skills upgrade things like acceleration and handling to make driving just a bit better. Though, I don't remember if it made much of a difference.
By the second half of the game, you'll end up doing A LOT of race and wanted events to advance in the story with another job, only to get a quick cutscene that doesn't add very much and get thrown back into the game's ugly city. There are only thirty-four jobs in all, and to keep the player from doing them all at once, the game pads things out to where it's a gamble for whether or not you'll play another job next. There are only three job types: "hot car," where Rose has you deliver a stolen car to a destination, "wheelman," which is the same as escape, and "boss chasedown," where you ram your car into a boss' car enough times to take them out. Because of how buggy the game is (and EA not caring enough to patch things up), the game crashed three times when I tried to pick a job from the map. Thanks to GameFAQs, I found out that the only way to play them was to drive to the areas and start the job from the overworld. This is fine in text, but there is no way to set your own waypoints to know where you're going without opening the GPS map every few seconds.
When you're being chased by the police, which will happen a lot, it would have been good to have an option to set waypoints since there are "pursuit breakers" placed around the map. Pursuit breakers are structures that can topple on police cars to disable them. So when you're being chased, you're usually driving aimlessly until you find a pursuit breaker. For whatever reason, when you're chased after a race, you can't open the map (possibly another bug). You probably won't get busted often (only happened to me twice near the end of the game), but if you do, you'll lose money, which didn't matter to me since I rarely bought anything. If you're arrested three times, your car will be impounded. Towards the end of the game, there are police trucks that will definitely be a problem due to how they smash into your car to pursue you. When you're out of sight for a bit, a cooldown meter will show up. If the police see you, you're back to being chased, so you'll have to hide. Either where you think you'll be fine or in the hiding spots placed on the map during that period.
The PC version doesn't have good native controls for controllers, so I had to use a mod to improve them. The mod doesn't have rumble support, but it didn't bother me much. Other than that, the controls are mostly fine, but my biggest issue is how you don't have much control over the camera. The camera is fixed to wherever your car is facing, making some events and even chases annoying because you can't see who's around you. Police trucks will crash into you out of nowhere very often. This isn't the mod's fault and is entirely the fault of the developers. I don't know why camera controls were left out. It's worth noting that the Wii version has a button just for calling the police on yourself. Not sure why that's a thing either. There is no way to run cars off the road, and being so used to it from other racing games, I kept trying to do that.
The AI for your opponents is pretty bad. More often than not, they'll get into accidents on their own. Like I said before, event opponents don't offer much of a challenge. Even what made that one highway battle event a problem for me was the traffic. In the last few jobs of the game, your enemies will get stuck in spots. This continued to the very last job. Speaking of which, being chased by the police while doing a takedown job wasn't a good idea. Sure, it adds some challenge in an otherwise easy game, but once the trucks hit you and throw you off course, it's either get busted, lose your opponent and fail the mission, or try to quickly get out of a bind and chase the other driver before they get away. It probably took me over an hour to beat the last mission, and while trying, the game crashed on me once. I almost gave up for the day, and then one of the game's glitches came to my aid. It let me take my opponent out with one hit.
The soundtrack is good but only plays during races or when you're in the garage. Not to mention that only a handful of songs regularly play. What usually plays in races ranges from rock to rap. A few of the memorable tracks are "Girls in Black" by Airbourne, "Burning Fence (Instrumental)" by Asian Dub Foundation, "I Once Was Lost But Now Am Profound" by From First to Last, "Never Wanted to Dance (Electro Hurtz Mix)" by Mindless Self Indulgence, "Piedras vs. Tanques" by Ojos de Brujo, "First Warning" by The Prodigy, and "Like Knives" by The Fashion. Twenty-three songs play in races according to NFSSoundtrack, but those are a few that I remember playing constantly. By the end of the game, I started playing my own music, but I leveled it to where I could still hear the in-game audio. Because of the lack of subtitles, I had to pause whenever a cutscene started or when the T-Mobile icon popped up.
Undercover offers "secret codes" you can input in the pause menu. These codes unlock different rewards such as free cars and money. While researching for the review, I found that they sold Hot Wheels Maisto cars to promote the game. The cars came packed with the secret codes for the game, which is pretty neat. They even sell for cheap on eBay if you're interested. It's a nice incentive to include the codes, but at the time, and even now, you could just search for them on the internet.
+ Campy cutscenes.
+ Events offer a fair challenge when there is one.
+ A fairly decent soundtrack.
+ The pink slip cars control well (except for the last one).
+ Wheelman skills are an interesting inclusion. I'm sure if they're in later games, they will make more of a difference, but as they are, I think it's a neat idea.
Cons:
- Little to no challenge.
- No reason to explore the city.
- Almost constant glitches.
- A decent story that isn't very present.
- Ugly graphics.
- No waypoints.
- Poor native controls.
- The events get repetitive very fast.
- Easily forgettable characters.
Final Thoughts:
After owning this game for over ten years, I have to admit that it's an enormous weight off my shoulders to have finally finished a version of this game. After all, that's what this blog is for. I wanted to like Undercover, but it mostly felt like a boring, monotonous, glitchy mess. After a while, the only thing keeping me interested was just advancing in the plot. Do I recommend Need for Speed: Undercover? Not at all. It isn't a terrible game, but it definitely lacks things when compared to racing games from its release year and prior. If you want to play a good racing game from this time, play either Midnight Club: LA or Burnout: Paradise; play both if you can. Both take every con of Undercover and makes for fun, challenging, open-world racing games.
Rating: 5/10
I hope you enjoyed this review. I know I'm definitely happy to finally have it finished. I finished the game in early June and started writing the review soon after, but I couldn't finish it because I was not home for a month and forgot to bring my footage with me. When I got back from my trip, I couldn't find the time to finish up the review. The next review will be celebrating the first anniversary of this blog, so stay tuned for that.
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