Wii Game Review - Need for Speed: Undercover

» By Nothing2Say | the 01-30-2010 at 13:22 | 31 views (16 unique) | 1 comment | Report post!

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If real vehicles handled like their counterparts in Need for Speed Undercover, every bend in the country’s roads would be littered with the twisted wreckage of dead cars. You wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without getting lamped by a flying hubcap.

Small wonder that the city of Undercover is crawling with police, desperate to stop anyone hitting the magic 50mph mark that turns their cars into a missile. Anyone caught cruising the streets looking for a race is likely to be tailed by a procession of cops and battered off the road before they can do any damage. Police pursuits are the new big thing in Need for Speed, and Undercover is closer to the NFS of old than last year’s track-based ProStreet. You can roam the city and the surrounding countryside – all streamed from the disc without loading pauses – and start events where you find them, or warp directly to the next race in Career mode.

If you break the law during a race you’ll be chased by an increasing number of cops. They set up roadblocks, call for reinforcements and generally make your illegal speeding as difficult as possible until you’re forced to stop or you manage to lose them by taking an unexpected turn. Once you’re in the clear there’s a cooling-off period in which you have to stay out of sight of the police or risk the whole thing starting up again. Many of the chases last upwards of five minutes, and because you can’t jump to a new event while you’re being chased it can get quite tedious. Just when you think you’ve lost your pursuers you’ll notice one of them on the radar, catching up at warp speed before settling back into the routine of following right on your rear bumper and being gradually outpaced.

The weird catch-up system extends to your rivals (just three of them) in races, who are devilishly tough to shake off yet strangely unwilling to press home an advantage. We’ve managed to ram into a wall on the last lap and still catch up with the other cars after they came speeding past, but we can’t win races by big margins when driving perfect laps.

Racing styles include standard checkpoint races, events where you just have to be in first place when the timer runs out, and ones where the last-placed driver gets eliminated at the end of each lap. Cash is earned for every success – or deducted if you manage to get arrested – and you can save up for better cars, new modifications or simply the pleasure of seeing a very large number of dollars in your on-screen bank account. During pursuits there’s a running total showing the cost to the taxpayer of your antics. It definitely makes ramming through a roadblock that little bit more satisfying when you can see how much damage you’ve caused, and it’s an incentive to use the slow-motion evasion camera, which enables you to fine-tune the final moments before impact.

There’s a lot of game in here, tied together by some live-action cutscenes that are supposed to make you feel like you’re starring in an interactive car movie/Nissan advert. Unfortunately, these nicely shot clips only serve to highlight the badness of the in-game graphics. The camera pans around groups of cool people arguing over some extremely shiny cars, but when you get into the driver’s seat it’s presented in eye-watering jerk-o-rama.

The framerate is extremely low for a driving game, causing the scenery to judder and flicker when turning a corner. There’s a shiny road effect that reflects everything and looks quite striking in still images, but if leaving it out would have made the game run smoother we wouldn’t have missed it. Anyway, real roads don’t look like mirrors, do they? The real killer is the draw-in distance, or lack of it. Despite there being hardly any traffic on the roads, when other cars appear they pop up right in front of you. If you pay attention to the road surface you can see their disembodied shadows in the near distance, before the cars and trucks spring into visible existence at the precise moment when it’s too late to avoid them. You can bash straight through most of the paper-light vehicles but hefty tankers will stop you dead.

Tailored properly to fit the Wii’s strengths, this could have been decent. Instead, it’s a bit of a shambles – much worse looking than last year’s effort and barely worth considering unless you’re totally desperate to be chased through a shiny, jerky city by cheating cops.