Oh dear god why, WHY!!!Undercover Brother
It's a shame that EA's pact with the devil was so short lived. We've seen some surprisingly fantastic original titles like Dead Space and Mirror's Edge from them this year. We've also seen superb updates of EA stock-in-trade favourites like Red Alert 3 and FIFA '09. So with reasonably high expectations I bought Need for Speed: Undercover.
Call the Need for Speed games one of my many gaming foibles. I don't care that they're usually as shallow as a teaspoon and about as race-tuned as a clapped out Austin Cambridge with shonky suspension, I like the cheesy mix of dreadful storylines and car modification.
Undercover looked like it had all the right ingredients. Daylight - Check. Cop chases are back - Check. FMV - Check. So what on earth went wrong when EA's Black Box studios slammed into the side of a small mountain in the Andes and were forced to feast on each other's flesh for sustenance?
Prostate problems
The first thing you notice with NFS Undercover is just how vacant it all feels. The promised FMV does very little to flesh out the by-the-numbers "cop gone undercover, gone bad or has he?"clichéd storyline so as soon as you fire up the game you're hurled straight into the action before the start credits have even had a chance to scroll.
Your first experience in Tri-City (the setting for this latest slice of auto-erotica) involves running hell-for-leather from a bunch of pursuing cops. The development team haven't completely forgotten everything they've learned and you'll soon find that the cop chases in Undercover are more or less exactly like those in Most Wanted. A good thing, and this title needs as many of those as it can get.
The problems become apparent early on in that speedy chase though. First thing you notice is that the framerates are so erratic that you'll often misjudge a corner, expecting a nice smooth transition with your back-end slipping slightly out, but instead the game engine has other ideas - slowing down to sub-ten frames per sec before realising it has some catching up to do, then pipping things up to thirty frames per sec just in time to send you careering into the nearest wall.
This inconsistency of framerate pretty much ruins the entire game no matter what class of car you end up in. But it's not the worst thing about the game. Yes there really is worse.
Once you're established as an insider in the seedy Tri-City car theft underworld, you start to infiltrate the first gang of car-nicking hoodlums and swiftly insinuate yourself into their gang. Now the real meat and bones of the game can begin, and you can call up your GPS map to see what mischief you can get up to. Various missions are dotted around - everything from sprint races against several opponents, to checkpoint races played against the clock.
Hot cop action
Later on as things get hot, there are also plenty of cop missions ranging from simple escape and evasion levels to the more fun destruction of property levels, in which you cause as much damage to public property as possible within a set time.
It's fair to say that a few players might find a hint of nostalgia here if they remember to skip the last couple of crappy NFS write-offs and go back to the very first NFS on the 360 - Most Wanted. Evading the cops and running rings round them does feel quite cool, and the AI is pretty well matched for a decent Need for Speed driver, it's just such a shame that the game's core engine is so hideously broken.
As you'd expect from a Need for Speed title, there are plenty of car modification options on offer - the only problem is that you have to complete a lot of repetitive races before you finally unlock the auto shops, as they're not available from the outset. This is incredibly frustrating as the first car you're given is a bit of a clunker to say the least, so it seems maddening that the game doesn't let you start monkeying around with the more creative side of things until you've played for quite a while.
The mod options feel somewhat restricted and pared down from previous titles so lazy drivers will probably end up just auto-tuning their cars for performance and handling, and concentrating on the visuals. Again there don't seem to be quite as many visual options as you'd think, and what's even more insulting is that you can't create a superb looking street machine and show it off to your mates online - Vinyls tax the poor ickle game engine too much in multiplayer so only your base paint job will be seen online.
This all seems a little last-generation to me, particularly as I've already bought and played possibly the best street-racing game of the year - Midnight Club: Los Angeles. Rockstar's opus, in complete contrast to this latest Need for Speed offering reeks of polish and hard work, and is a much slicker game both in handling and looks. To take a simple example, Tri-City's roads in Need for Speed make the whole place feel like a ghost town whereas Los Angeles in MCLA is a living breathing vibrant and traffic-choked American city, just as you'd want it to be.
Change your brain, change your game
Ultimately it seems that no matter what I type here, Need for Speed: Undercover will probably sell well enough to keep it in the charts in the run up to Christmas. The british games-buying public are a funny bunch and as they've practically ignored MCLA wholesale to the point where it's already being discounted, you can bet that most of the hardened street-racer-modder brigade were waiting for NFS to arrive and will probably (stupidly, like me) buy it sight unseen.
That's a travesty. When you consider that the better game is a tenner cheaper, features realtime day to night cycles, better car models AND motorbikes, realistic weather conditions, is tough and challenging and has better cop chases it makes me feel like pleading with people to just take a minute to think again before even taking a look at Need for Speed: Undercover because Rockstar have already bested it in practically every way with Midnight Club: LA.
Shoddily developed, and ruining EA's recent great run of titles, NFS: Undercover should be consigned to the nearest scrap heap. Games this rubbish shouldn't still be appearing on the 360 this late in its lifecycle so why do big publishers like EA think we'll put up with crap like this merely because of the name attached to it?
What happens when you blend Super Mario Bros, with Tetris?
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The Bargains Thread...
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TarantulaBoy52 - on 24/11/2008 at 20:23 wrote:
I dunno Peej. It's a hell of a lot better than Pro Street and whilst the canyon runs of Carbon have been replaced by equally frustrating freeway chases the game does play quite nicely and deliver some enjoyable high speed hijinks even if the story is a bit ropey.
mal - on 24/11/2008 at 22:30 wrote:
Something wrong in Peej's setup perhaps? I can't see why it'd be dropping so many frames unless there was a big change in the amount of detail on screen (but you'd notice that), network crapness (but that'd affect everything I'd have thought) or crappy auto-load code (but I assumed the races in NFS are still point-to-point - correct me if I'm wrong). Seems odd.
TarantulaBoy52 - on 24/11/2008 at 23:12 wrote:
I've been playing it pretty much non-stop since Friday and the only thing that I'm really noticing is that it gets repetitive really quickly. I don't have an HD TV though...
Whizzo - on 25/11/2008 at 00:10 wrote:
Bit odd this is the first next gen NFS that there's no demo available for pre-release.
HairyArse - on 25/11/2008 at 07:39 wrote:
Peej isn't the only person to complain about rubbish frame rates. Garnett Lee on the 1up show said at times it runs like those animations you used to draw on the pages of your notebooks as a kid.
peej - on 25/11/2008 at 07:47 wrote:
Fraid to say that this is on a brand new 360 so it's unlikely to be my machine that's causing the frame drops. They make it almost unplayable to the point that it feels like the machine's being stretched to its limits. Odd when you consider that the game's not any prettier than the previous few NFS games.
Maybe it's been tuned for non HD setups. I also thought it might be because it was installed rather than just running straight off the DVD but I uninstalled it and that made no difference whatsoever (nor did the sneaky patch they put out on saturday for it).
All in all, Midnight Club aces it in every single way.
peej - on 25/11/2008 at 07:48 wrote:
I should also add that I bought both games (as in paid my own hard earned for 'em) so I'm not being biased by freebie preview copies or anything :)
And as Whizzo said - very telling that there's been no demo, and very little pre-release hype or excitement. Note also that during the preview trailers etc, the team demoed the game more or less running in an empty sandbox city with no other cars around. Very sneaky!
peej - on 26/11/2008 at 16:34 wrote:
AND ANOTHER THING!
Paying, like real money, to fix your car or mod it.
No. Just no. Fuck off.
HairyArse - on 26/11/2008 at 17:03 wrote:
The thing that's frustrating about this particular type of DLC is that there are clearly gullible bastards prepared pay for it. Otherwise they'd have sacked that idea off a long long time ago.
peej - on 01/12/2008 at 17:02 wrote:
I don't think you even have to be that gullible, just a bit careless.
Put it this way, it's presented in a way that (if you've got points sitting there doing nothing) could easily be tripped by mistake, spending your hard earned microsoft points on something that you can get in the game for free more or less anyway. Very sneaky, very naughty and EA should be hauled over the coals for it, particularly as they still refuse to "play nice" with MS over Live and insist on you signing into the EA networks separately whenever you want to do anything online. The stupid c*nts.
mal - on 03/12/2008 at 16:14 wrote:
Hang on - you have to pay real money to repair your car in game?
Syrok - on 03/12/2008 at 16:43 wrote:
If it's like ProStreet you can pay for it if you are too lazy to win a few races in-game.
Just like you can buy all unlockable cars.
peej - on 04/12/2008 at 09:47 wrote:
Yes indeed. It's not so much that its outrageous that you can pay for repairs if you're lazy, it's the rather sneaky way it's there as a menu option that's rather stealthily placed. If you're a little on the careless side, you can accidentally go through the menus and end up paying real money for repairs and upgrades. EA did do this in Pro Street too and I thought it was bad enough then but they obviously must've caught a few people out last time, otherwise they wouldn't have put it in this too.
Makes me laugh. EA don't like MS and Live - but oh boy they love the microtransactions stuff.