Need For Speed Undercover

Undercover is evidently a concoction of street racing (courtesy of the Underground games) with a dash of police evading (taken from Most Wanted and Carbon). This should have resulted in a near perfect racing game. Instead a pretty average game, with some major flaws, is the reality.
Everything in this game is done on a boastful scale. The 55 vehicles, the CGI cutscenes, the graphics are all extremely impressive, but the actual gameplay was all too repetitive and certainly not worthy what I expected. But nevertheless I'll focus first on the positives.

There are lots of cars available in the game. The first I chose was the Lotus Elise, I then quickly worked my way up to the Bugatti Veyron and the Audi R8 and other exotic cars. The handling of the cars are great although not entirely realistic, but this is not Project Gotham or Grand Turismo, and nor does it pretend to be.

The Cut-scenes do not add anything particular to the game. They are visually good to look at, and it does give a sort of glamorous effect to the game, but I feel that they were just added after the game was created to lenghten it.

At times the general graphics during the races are realistic, but the frame rate can ruin this at other times. This isn't too much of problem on the Xbox 360 but it is for the Playstation 3.
In terms of gameplay, the races are good but they become so repititive. Then I wasshocked as my two favourite game modes were missing from the game. These being the Drift and the Drag modes. If these two modes would have been incorporated into the game it would have been more varied and made it longer.

With this game think EA was trying to har to please. With Prostreet many complained that, whilst the gameplay was good, the lack of story and the change was not appreciated. So EA halfheartedly focused on the gameplay and paid most attention to the story and the cutscenes. Will the Need for Speed series ever reach the heights of Most Wanted again?

Real Reviewer Rating: 6.5/10