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Recently I purchased EA's "Need for Speed Underground 2" and fired it up. Since then, my step-son and I have spent many long hours playing it. This review is a condensed version of our experience putting this game through its paces.
If you've seen the movie "The Fast and the Furious" starring Vin Diesel, then you have a pretty good idea what Need for Speed Underground 2 is like. You play the role of an aspiring street racer who has moved to a new city. You are given an initial car with "stock" everything. As you win races with other street racers, you'll collect money that will allow you to accessorize and tune your car for maximum performance. Along the way, the races you win will unlock new parts, new accessories, and new vehicles to drive. You can even sign up with sponsors, who will set certain requirements for you in exchange for things they will give you. The graphics in the game are quite good and realistic. They respond smoothly and fluidly, and with as much detail as you'd expect in a modern racing game. Sounds are also good. Each make and model of car sounds a little different from the others, and the sound changes in response to the upgrades you make to the car. Controls respond quickly when you press them. For the most part, I think the default control layout is optimal and logical. The use of the Alt key for nitrous boost was problematic for me, as the "Windows" key is next to the Alt key on my keyboard. When I wasn't paying careful attention, I would sometimes hit the Windows key in a tense part of a difficult race. This would cause the game to go to the background and Windows to go into a tailspin trying to bring the desktop and Start menu up for me. I realize I could remap the key, but I got used to it being the Alt key and it was hard to change it and get used to the new position. The game has a fairly large playing map, with a nice selection of terrain. It includes everything from winding uphill roads to long, straight, level, multi-lane highways. At different times, you're required to race on just about every road in the game. The game has a fairly limited number of race types, but they vary enough that you won't get tired of them until you have beaten the game. The race types include: - Drift: In these races, you get points for putting the car into a controlled slide. The longer you can keep the slide going without hitting anything, the more points you'll get. The more points you get, the more likely you are to win. Having a "slippery" car with lots of torque is valuable here. The "downhill" drifts in traffic are probably the second-hardest races in the game, as it's tough to go sliding down a hillside with other cars coming at you without bumping one of them or tapping a guard rail and losing your points.
- Sprint: In these races, you must be the first to cross the finish line. You will race between two specific points in the city. The first one there wins. Simple as that. Sometimes there are shortcuts and alternate routes you can take that will help you shave seconds off your time. If you have a fast car, these can be the easiest of the races.
- Circuit: In these races, a group of streets is selected that forms a roughly circular pattern. You race in this "track" for a given number of laps. The first car to complete the required number of laps around the circuit wins. If you have a decently fast car, these are probably the simplest races to win.
- Drag: These races limit the control you have of the car's steering. In exchange, they require you to take on the task of shifting gears at the appropriate moment. The closer your shifts are to the "perfect" time, the more speed your car will gain. The first person whose car gets across the finish line wins. For my money, these were the toughest and most frustrating races in the game. The computer-controlled racers seemed to rarely miss a shift or get into an accident, and unless I responded perfectly and poured on the nitrous at the end, I didn't stand a chance.
- URL: The "Underground Racing League" races are kind of a cross between the circuit and the drift races. By "drifting" at the right times, you'll gain nitrous, which you can use to power past your opponents. URL events are a series of two or three races that you win by accumulating the most points. Points are awarded based on your position at the finish line. The racer with the most points for the series is the winner.
In addition to the above races, there are three other kinds. One is a "race against time" where you are told that if you can reach a certain location within a specified amount of time, you will get a special part for your car. Another is a "race to publicity" where you have to meet a magazine or DVD cover photographer within a specific amount of time. If you get there in time, your car is photographed for the magazine or DVD. If not, it isn't. Last is a race against other street racers like yourself. Win these and you get some reputation points and cash. Occasionally, the racers will send you on a "race against time" to get a unique part for your car. Since both my 13-year-old step-son and I have spent a lot of hours playing this game, you can be sure that we are enjoying it. The races are challenging enough that we're willing to stick with them, but not so overwhelmingly difficult that we get tired of trying to win a specific one. Plus, it's fun to customize the look and performance of a "stock" vehicle, something that the game gives you a seemlingly endless array of possibilities to do. But this isn't to say that the game is without flaws. The good news is that the flaws can be overlooked or compensated for in your gameplay. For instance, I mentioned earlier that the use of the Alt key for nitrous boost sometimes causes me to hit the Windows key by accident. I could use the game's options to re-map that function to another key. I just chose not to. Another flaw is that although the game recognizes that you have a mouse and are clicking on interface elements on the screen, its response to those clicks is inconsistent. For example, if the game asks you whether you want to accept or decline a race, clicking the mouse on the "accept" button generates a beep that sounds like the game knows what to do. But it doesn't do anything. To accept the race, you have to hit the arrow key on the keyboard to highlight "Accept" and press the Enter key to "click" the "Accept" button. I am guessing this is a remnant of porting the game to/from a console. Regardless, it's a sloppy interface for a PC game. The mouse on a PC should work for anything that looks like an on-screen button. Although it's hard to call this a flaw, the game likes to show you slow-motion video of your car any time it leaves the ground for more than a split second. This happens even during intense races, and can really throw you off because it changes the camera perspective for 2-3 seconds and disables keyboard input. By the time the little "cut scene" is over, you've relaxed for a moment and your car is now slightly out of control. I can't tell you the number of times this "feature" caused me to have a minor to major accident. As near as I can see, you can't turn this off. Next is the the choice of vehicles in the game and the whole "unlocking" concept. If you suspend your disbelief and treat this as some kind of a simulation of a real street racing world, the "unlocking" part of the game is a load of crap. If I have accumulated enough money to buy a particular car, a particular performance part, or a particular accessory, there is no retailer in the country who'd refuse to sell you that item unless there is a legal issue in doing so (e.g., "that part is only available to police officers"). Having to wait until you win some arbitrary number of races to get a part that a "real" street racer could buy instantly is silly. While I accept the "unlocking" device as a way to keep you challenged by the game, that doesn't mean I like it or agree with it. I don't. The thing that perhaps bothered me most about NFSU2 is the array of cars available. Until you've played for quite a while, you can't buy a single American car (unless you count the Ford Focus, which is made overseas). When they finally unlock a couple of American cars, it's the Hummer H2 (which is hardly a performance vehicle) and the Cadillac Escalade (also not a performance vehicle). It's only very late in the game that you can pick up a Pontiac GTO or Ford Mustang GT. If you know anything about the "real street racing scene" (i.e., not the Hollywood version of it), you know that the movers and shakers in that scene are rarely driving Japanese or other foreign makes. Most will have Chevy Camaros, Ford Mustangs, and the like. That includes many of the "newbies" on the scene, since it's often cheaper to pick up a used Mustang or Camaro than a Honda, Toyota, or Hyundai. There are also a lot more parts available for the American Iron, at lower costs, to generate more horsepower. So the fact that you have to play around with a Honda Civic from the start is more Hollywood's idea (think "The Fast and the Furious") than a real depiction of the street racing scene. But again, if you can suspend your disbelief, this is an aspect of the game you can get around, since the selection of cars is decent enough to allow you to get "something better" when you need it. The one aspect of the game that's hardest to get past, though, is the physics used in the game for vehicle traction. I'm betting that a real, tuned-up Honda Civic with bald tires on slick, wet pavement wouldn't slide a third as much as a stock Civic in the game with new tires on dry pavement going 35 miles per hour. Cars slide with little provocation and require considerable coaxing to stop them from doing so. I've seen cars going 15 miles per hour slide what would equate to 5-10 feet in the real world. I'm sorry, EA, but something's just wrong with that. I drive a 2002 Ford Mustang GT with performance tires on it, and my car doesn't slide going around sharp turns at 50mph speeds, and even on slippery, wet pavement I've never slid more than a few inches or found the car impossible to recover when the wheels start to spin. I suppose all this sliding around makes for a more dramatic "teaser" video for the game, but it makes for a game that's very unrealistic and at times extremely frustrating to play. (And no, I didn't have the car "tuned" for drifting when this happened. It was tuned for precisely the kind of race I was in when it happened.) More often, I lose a race in NFSU2 not because I'm a lousy driver or my car wasn't fast enough. I lose the race because the car gets into one of these "complete loss of traction" moments and won't get out of it until I completely take my "foot" off the accelerator and let the wheels stop moving. Real cars do not respond that way... at least not the ones I've ever driven, and I've driven quite a few. On a 1-10 scale, with a 10 being excellent, I'd have to rate NFSU2 about a 7.5.
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