November 18, 2008 - EA's Need for Speed franchise has been in an odd position the last couple years. While the franchise often worked to mix up the formula from year to year a decent bit, the release of EA's own Burnout Paradise posed a bit of a conundrum for the publisher. With Burnout switching to an open world setting, it meant that it competed directly with Need for Speed in that space. Last year's Need for Speed ProStreet was a diversion for the series from recent years, going to track-based racing, plenty of tuning options and focusing entirely on the events than exploring the city or running from the cops.
ProStreet didn't turn out too well, so Black Box went back to the drawing board and returned to an open world setting with this year's Need for Speed Undercover, but that wasn't the only design change. Undercover also seems to be directed right at the casual market, both in terms of presentation and its extremely relaxed learning curve.
The end result, however, is a game that has practically zero redeeming qualities. It fails on almost every front and is a major step backwards not only for the franchise, but racing games in general. With Burnout Paradise having been out forever (and supported incredibly well by Criterion) and Midnight Club: Los Angeles having just shipped recently, the competition is very strong, leaving no reason whatsoever to choose Undercover over either of the aforementioned titles.
Part of the reason for this is the game's complete and utter misuse of its open world setting. The major reason for having an open world is to allow gamers to explore their environment, find new challenges, perhaps some hidden locations and generally hunt down people to race. That doesn't happen one bit in Undercover. You cannot even drive to an event to start it or enter your garage. To begin an event, you can either head to the overhead map, which requires a couple of seconds of loading despite its utter simplicity, or simply press down on the D-Pad. This will load up whatever your nearest event is, or in some cases, the next major event you're supposed to take part in.
All of this means that unless you're running from the cops, there's absolutely no reason to drive around the city when not in an event. You can't come across any hidden events, new racers or anything of this sort. Unless just feel like testing out your ride or just feel like exploring, there's no reason to drive around on your own.
The open world setting is also ignored in many of the game's events. When you take part in any standard race, the game closes off the streets so that you can only drive on the correct route. It's the game's way of putting you in a pre-defined track and not letting you veer from the beaten path. While transparent arrow walls would have been fine, this restricts not only you and your competition, but the traffic to the set race course as well. In other words, there's no cross traffic to deal with. How can you have an open world game and not have any cross traffic to contend with in races?
Not all events are like this, but they don't get much better. One event type challenges you to get out in front of your competition and then stay ahead for a minute or so (or just pull away entirely). Once you're able to get ahead, it's an absolute piece of cake to dominate them, especially if you head to the highway since they'll likely crash into someone and leave you with such a gigantic lead that you can come to a complete stop, start again and still have plenty of breathing room.
This brings me to my next issue - the game is incredibly easy. It was fairly often that I'd win events by a good 20 seconds or so, and I'd have the worst car in the pack. In fact, I've been able to smoke a lineup of Lamborghinis and Corvettes with an Audi TT, and that should never happen. If your car's ratings are half of what your competition has, you can probably win with ease.
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