Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Chris Miller

I like it when reviews are easy to write.  When I can confidently state, “You should buy this game because of X”, or “This game is a steaming pile of monkey dung because of Y”, it makes my life simple, and makes the job of a game review thoroughly enjoyable.  Unfortunately, this is not such a review.  In fact, I have spent the better part of a week really struggling to try and put my thoughts on NFS:UC together.  On paper, everything about this game just screams arcade racing perfection.  When it’s good, it can be pretty fun.  Unfortunately, it hits the other end of the spectrum just as hard, and manages to completely fall down in several key areas.  So bear with me here, and forgive me if I sound somewhat schizophrenic in my analysis.  Here goes nothing…

Graphics are easily the biggest problem to plague NFS:UC, but let’s start with the good.  The cars you drive look uniformly excellent, as do most of the backgrounds and scenery.  This is good since you’ll be racing through a wide variety of cityscapes and countrysides.  The game world is very large, although very sparsely populated.  There is some decent damage modeling, but it doesn't have any effect on performace and it is a bit jarring to see your crumpled car pop right back into shape as soon as a race ends.  The sense of speed is spot on, there’s plenty to see, and for the most part, the game has a clean, next-gen feel to it.

So why, then, are all the NPC cars lo-res blocky messes that look like they were ported straight from a PS1 title?   Why do all the shadows from trees and buildings appear as pixilated blobs that sometimes move in directions that are completely wrong for the camera orientation?  Who on earth thought it would be a good idea for approximately half the races to be driving directly into a blinding sun with a highly reflective road surface?  Why am I encountering rampant pop-in and random collision issues?   Why are the streets of this huge city nearly empty, except in specific races?   Most importantly, why the hell do I get a silky smooth framerate when I’m racing with a dozen other cars on-screen, and inexplicably slow down to a single-digit frame per second slideshow when I’m completely by myself on a barren straightaway!?   Of all the graphics problems, the fame rate issue is by far the most frustrating of all.   It bogged down the game on multiple occasions, and made many races far tougher than they needed to be.   Honestly, I’m a bit shocked that such a high profile title would be released in such a shoddy state.

The story in NFS:UC revolves around you as an undercover cop (hence the title) infiltrating a car-stealing and smuggling ring.  It is told through a series of highly touted yet spectacularly awful live-action cutscenes, with Maggie Q (Die Hard:  With a Vengance) as your main law enforcement point of contact and gaggle of other D-list actors.  These scenes are laughably bad and in most cases, completely unnecessary.  On more than one occasion, the game would load up a cutscene – complete with “edgy” MTV-esque camera angles and ADD camera movements – just so a character could make an inane comment like, “We don’t know anything about her, but she might be involved.”  Yes, that's the entire cutscene.  Oscar material they are not, and the story and cutscenes are really only worth mentioning because of how silly they are.

Unfortunately, the bad far outweighs the good in the graphics department, and most people will be left scratching their heads at some very strange design decisions.  Even when the game finally starts to suck you in and get you immersed - such as during the adrenaline pumping police chases – you can be sure that something will come along and knock you back to reality.  In the case of the police chases, it’s the ridiculously poor rendering of the “special events” (more on that in a bit).  Frankly, there’s simply nothing here that will wow you in any way, and it seems very much like NFS:UC was rushed out the door half-baked. 

The sound is fine, but nothing to write home about.  There’s a decent variety of tracks available, although it seemed like I kept hearing the same ones over and over again.  Nothing really struck my musical fancy, but there weren’t any that I immediately wanted to skip over either.  For the most part, the cars all sound realistic and the racing sounds (i.e. squealing tires, crashing barricades) are well-done.  I did notice that most of the crash effects started to sound exactly the same after a while, but it’s not a deal-breaker.

For the most part, NFS: UC controls pretty well.  As with all racing games, the early races are punctuated by slower cars that handle like you’re driving them through mud.  By the time you reach the Tier 1 cars, however, you damn well better know how to drive because they are lightning fast.  The first time you jump into a Porsche 911 or a souped-up Lambroghini, I can almost guarantee you’ll be bouncing off barriers left and right until you get the feel for it. 

Problem is, the physics occasionally just felt…off.   I’d sometimes go flying over a hill that I would expect to catch air from, yet my car would remain rooted to the ground.  On occasion, I’d take a turn too fast and be ready to slide off the road, but would end up zipping right around it like I was on rails.   It didn’t occur all the time, but every once in a while, the physics and control would really leave me wondering, “how on earth did that happen?”

You would think that taking the solid street racing of Need for Speed titles past and adding the police chases from Most Wanted would be a drool-worthy combination.  Unfortunately, the gameplay is where things really start to unravel for NFS: UC.  As the titular undercover officer, you are tasked with a variety of racing jobs to build your street cred.  Basic sprint and lap circuit tracks are available, as is an outrun mode (you have to stay ahead of your opponent for a full minute), a highway battle (get a lead of 1,000 feet, racing through a crowded highway), and checkpoint races.  You can also choose specific jobs or police events; such as escaping pursuit, causing a set amount of damage, or disabling a certain number of cop cars. 

The crux of the problem is that these events are all either ridiculously easy (I once won a Highway Battle event in about 20 seconds when my opponent got stuck behind traffic), or reach a level of controller-throwing difficulty rarely seen in racing games.  Somewhere around the latter third of the game, things start to switch from one to the other, and it simply becomes incredibly un-fun.  Your opponents will suddenly change from leisurely Sunday drivers to complete street racing maniacs (sometimes during the course of a single race), leaving you wondering exactly what performing-enhancing substances they might be on. 

You receive XP for each race, which serves to upgrade your "Wheelman" level.  If you beat a certain time limit, you will also “dominate” a race, which gives you extra bonuses - RPG style - to your driver attributes such as brakes, handling, nitrous, etc.  In theory, this is a good system, but since all the stats carry over with you no matter what car you drive, it ends up making all the cars feel like carbon copies of each other.  Part of the fun with any driving title is choosing and tweaking all sorts of rides.  In NFS:UC, I ended up only using a few basic cars I received through missions, and never really bothered to alter or adjust them much.  When you visit the garage and every single car shows significantly lower performance that what you’re currently driving, it doesn’t really make you want to drop much of your hard-earned cash on a new ride.  There are a number of upgrades available (spoilers, decals, tires, etc.), which can be bought either with in-game cash, or you have the oh-so-appealing option of buying them with MS points.  That's right, you can drop actual money to buy that nifty exhaust system you've been eying!  I know it's a money maker for EA, but this is an asinine trend that I would be perfectly happy to see disappear forever. 

NFS:UC takes place in a huge open world...which unfortunately is completely irrelevant to gameplay.  Sure, you can drive through the city to reach the next starting point, but there’s absolutely zero reward for doing so.  No bonus items, no hidden secrets, just barren streets that lead from point A to point B.  Since most of the races are on a set course, there’s not even any value in exploring the city to find shortcuts or new routes.   My guess is that 99% of players will simply choose the next race from the world map and completely ignore the open world aspect. 

One of the main draws - the police chases – are a mixed bag.  As with most of the race events, they wind up being either way too simple in the early game, and far too hard in the late.   You typically have a time limit in which to complete the chase (i.e. escape, cause X amount of damage, or disable vehicles).  Early in the game, evading the one or two cop cars sent after you takes little effort.  ‘Special events’ help to disable your pursuit and give you time to get away, and are marked with a flashing orange triangle, as well as a special marker on the map.  Simply drive over them to cause havoc such as releasing a load of steel pipes, causing a crane to fall, knocking down a billboard, or bringing down an entire freeway overpass.  Sadly, these events are very poorly animated, and more often than not will completely break any immersion.  At the higher levels, you will need to evade cop cars that spawn seemingly out of mid-air (and apparently are capable of breaking the sound barrier), hide from helicopters until they run out of fuel, and use a ‘bullet time’ slo-mo to break through barriers and evade spike strips.   Outrunning the fuzz can provide some thrills,  but at the end of the day, these chases ended up being far more frustrating than fun for me.  Your personal mileage may vary.

Some games achieve that level of synergy where the end result becomes much more than the sum of its individual parts.  NFS:UC, on the other hand, feels like just the opposite.  Everything simply comes across as ho-hum and uninspired, and it seems like we’ve seen and done all of it a million times before.  The tracks themselves aren’t particularly exciting, the AI is decent but unspectacular, and the whole package just reeks of “get this out the door in time for the holidays”.

The campaign is a decent length, and will probably take most gamers between 12-15 hours to complete.  Once you’ve completed your undercover work, you can take your racing skills online to compete in some straight-up races, or a capture-the-flag type game called Cops and Robbers.  I never had any problems either finding other players or joining games, and the community seemed very active and competitive.  I wasn’t personally crazy about Cops & Robbers (every match I tried seemed to be heavily slanted towards the robbers), but it’s a decent idea. Here’s the strange thing.  Even with the myriad of gameplay and graphic issues, I still found myself having some fun with NFS:UC.  Especially during the middle third of the game – between the ridiculously easy and insanely hard bits – there was a glimmer of some great challenges and more than a few heart-pounding moments.  Weaving through a crowded highway at 110 MPH was fun.  Slamming through a 180 slide turn to try and lose a cop can actually get the pulse up a bit.   It just seemed like these moments were sandwiched between a huge number of mundane gameplay events or  wonky graphic issues.  Every time I started to think, “You know, this is really fun”, some new issue would pop in and bring me back down to reality.  Released in a vaccum, NFS:UC would be a solid arcade racer.  However, when stacked up against its competition, it ends up looking rather dull and problematic.  There’s probably a fantastic game in there somewhere, and given a bit more development time, it might have shown it’s true colors.  As is, however, NFS:UC is awfully tough to recommend.

Gaming Trend Score

67

1. Graphics: 58
2. Audio: 76
3. Controls: 73
4. Gameplay: 59
5. Value/Replay: 75
6. OVERALL:67