Need for Speed: Undercover doesn’t quite rev it up

In the early days of open-ended driving games, the PS1’s Driver was a pretty big deal. Not only could you evade cops in a real city like Chicago or San Francisco, but you could just drive around and see the sights if you wanted to.

Well, evidently the folks at EA’s Black Box studios never heard of Grand Theft Auto, much less any other open-world game, since the fictional Tri-Bay city in Need For Speed: Undercover is about as bereft of things to do as Driver‘s was, only they don’t have the excuse of the comparatively piddling 32-bit processing power of Sony’s old system.

This is emblematic of most the problems present in the game. Although there are a lot of cool ideas working here, Need for Speed: Undercover constantly undermines itself. Take the game’s inclusion of a GPS unit, for instance. Although the city is open, meaning you can drive to the game’s destination, you can alternately pull up the GPS and click on a destination. Boom, you’re there.

After the relative thrill of running from the cops wears off (which takes about 10 minutes, since most of the time they’re not very smart) there’s pretty much no reason to drive anywhere. The map is too big, and since there aren’t other things to do, it’s a lot of wasted space–not to mention potential.

Equally as frustrating are the game’s cinematic moments, like barreling through a huge pipe onto a street below, or busting through a fence and jumping your car over another road, clearing a gap. Again, these feel like wasted scenarios because they’re so few and far between, and even when they do appear they aren’t too exciting.

It’s clear that Need for Speed: Undercover desperately wants to be a game in the Burnout series, whose dizzying sense of speed and climactic collisions stand out as pinnacles of the racing genre, but it just doesn’t quite go the distance. Add to all this a ludicrously acted story that’s a verbatim rip-off of The Fast and the Furious (with live-action FMV cut scenes, making the game feel like it came out in 1994) and you get the idea.

The game ain’t all bad though. To Black Box’s credit, the driving part of the game is well put-together, with any of the game’s various new sports cars and old-school roadsters driving as silky smooth or as unwieldy as you customize them to be.

But really, given the open world and the way the game’s design undermines itself at every turn (not to mention the graphics, which have a pretty bad case of  “this-game-looks-better-in-screenshots”) there are better racers on the market than this one. Unless you’re a huge NFS fan or really, really, need a speed fix, go with Burnout Paradise instead. It’s almost a year old already, but it runs rings around this one.