NFS Undercover review

What can be said about it? Another (the twelfth, to be precise) game in the NFS series. I said "another" for a reason. Fans expected something radically new, unexpected, extraordinary from it, and what did they get? A copy of the four previous installments, assembled into one whole, with inflated system requirements. At first everyone thought the developers had simply gotten lazy - they didn't make a demo before release - but now the picture has become clear. If a demo had come out, everyone would have quickly downloaded it, played it, realized what kind of game it was, and then EA would have made almost no profit from this project. Many connoisseurs of the NFS series saw through the deception and didn't fall for this trick; they expected nothing outstanding from Undercover. But there are far more newcomers than pros, so the deception worked and the developers did indeed line their pockets by deceitful means. Well, never mind, let's stop musing about EA's commercial dealings and move on to the guest of honor…

I think from the previous paragraph you understood my attitude toward the game, but merely stating a fact isn't enough - justification is needed too. Here's mine:
If this were the only NFS game, there would be no objections at all - they'd say, not bad for a first try, they'll improve! But there's one catch - this is the twelfth installment! New characters, some cars and of course the city (quite large, by the way), in short, the essential new features without which the game makes no sense. The rest is either the same as in one of the installments (race types and game modes, for example), or a mix of several (car handling on the track). The plot is pulled out of thin air, and it strongly resembles the plot of MW (a sworn enemy, a girl and cops following you). The car roster is quite large, but the overwhelming majority are converts from previous installments, which is not pleasing. Wretched gameplay, simple loading screens (the creation of which is within a tenth-grader's ability) look childish, unlike previous installments. But can such a difference be called progress? Of course not!

Overall the whole game is more like a second-rate movie with a big budget. Every jump is shown from the side, spectacular collapses of cranes, pipes, bridges, etc. occur. However, it's simply unbearable to see the face of the policewoman with a prominent pimple on her lip, and from a fairly close distance at that; you can't watch the actors without regret, actors whose eardrums Stanislavsky would have torn out with his signature: "I DON'T BELIEVE IT!" and so on.

The realism of the car's physics is largely broken - it drives as if on rails, reacts very sensitively to the handbrake, up to a 360-degree spin, and regular brakes are practically useless. The same happened with the camera through which you look at the road - now it rotates around the car as soon as you start to turn.
The impression of the game is made even worse by the fact that the overall gameplay has become uninteresting: you can no longer drive through the city heading to the start of a race, you can't hum a single song because they don't stick in your memory (a single "I am rock" would have wiped the floor with all of Undercover's tracks), the traffic has become very heavy, touch it once and you immediately hit a wall, fleeing from cops has become less dynamic, you constantly have to slow down, and these aren't some trifles, but almost the entire game! Everything listed reminds me of the game L.A. Rush, and that's just an arcade game, little-known and not very interesting (in my opinion).

Let's step away from listing the shortcomings (and there's a whole sea of them) and try to formulate a definition for this game. Personally, I perceive it like this - a stupid, uninteresting arcade game teeming with bugs and lag, constantly freezing and absolutely NOT worth it. It will quickly bore gamers and will be forgotten.
If EA doesn't take this matter more seriously, there will be a mass rejection of NFS by fans. People will stop buying the next installments and then this series will wither away for good. A new era of NFS must begin, and not by beefing up the graphics engine (as LucasArts did with SW The Force Unleashed), but through something radically new. First it was Hot Pursuit (both the first and the second), then Underground, then Most Wanted, and now what? We ordinary fans aren't privy to that.

I'm sure everyone is tired of giving the developers a "second" chance, but what else can we do? We'll wait, hope that someday, at last, a miracle will appear, adorned with a golden halo, and once again amaze people who have gone gray with boredom…

Author: Ralor for nfs.place