Need for Speed: Undercover

So this past week, with a snow day and all I found Need For Speed: Undercover on Steam for only 10 bucks. According to my usual spending habits, I went ahead and coughed up a couple to try this out. Well after playing it about 25 hours total over the past week, I am now writing my official review on it. I'm probably going to post the review below on a couple of other sites as well.

I've always liked racing games, Need for Speed: Underground, and Underground 2 weren't too bad in my opinion, I played them on the Gamecube, so I never had compatibility issues of course, but they definitely were fun. Since then the only racing I've done is Mario Kart: Double Dash and Mario Kart Wii (plus a little Mario Kart DS, I love Mario Kart) So I went ahead and downloaded and installed Undercover, the very first thing I noticed is it ran with an average of 10 fps at max settings (and mind you, I'm running an AMD Athlon X2 64, with 3GB RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT. I played it on Windows 7 Professional) so I turned the settings all down to low and achieved about 30 FPS. Even with this I still received a few spikes, especially when rounding turns and making jumps.

So really my only criticism's are here: the game seems to be poorly coded, the graphics are nothing extreme but my 9800 GT is hardly able to handle it! The other thing is, in being a racing game where you are usually moving at about 200 MPH or higher, you would expect the collision system to be made JUST FOR high-speed races right? Well I notice that when hitting things like light poles and cones at anything over 150 MPH, it appeared you went right through it and then both the sound, and the action of the cone falling over were delayed. But as far as that collision thing goes, I guess I am just picky!

The game has several achievements, and if I had any friends that were actively playing NFS, it would be fun to try to get the different achievements before them, and beat them in private races! The storyline is fairly short (I beat it within 14 hours of playing!) but you can still redo all the races and try to "Dominate" all of them by getting a really good time. The career mode does die down a little quickly though. Now it's fun to hop on a few times a week for about an hour to race against other people online, but the game's replayability level is very low. Overall the game is fairly easy and probably geared toward any casual gamer, and for the hard-core gamers like myself there is always online multiplayer!

If you are thinking about buying this, go ahead and do so if you can get it for 10 or 15 bucks, it is worth the small price. If you think you are a hard-core gamer though, you should probably check out some other racing game.