Need for Speed Underground

"Racing Underground... but with a flying car!"

Need for Speed: Underground. A very promising, yet, just about the average racing game.
Nice touches here and there, but a tiresome gameplay and easy to hate physic rules throw a lot to the ground.

STORY
Well, taking in account the Underground mode the game provides it actually has some sort of poor story.
You're a newbie to the underground scene with the fantasy of owning a suited up car and racing in style.....
But at the start, it's just a fantasy... you actually start with a low-grade vehicle that misses any sort of cool looking features as well race worthy performance.

Trough the ''story mode'' you unlock all sort of stuff to upgrade your car in visual and performance, as well as unlock new cars to buy.

GAMEPLAY
It goes high and it goes low!
The highs starting off by the idea of customising your set of wheels by a fair level in what it comes to visual aspect. As you progress trough underground mode you will have access to all sort of stuff as spoilers, tinted windows, neon lights... and stickers!

There are ''2 ways'' of unlocking stuff! One is the progression way.. it will unlock the performance upgrades and visual ''worthy'' upgrades (increases reputation multiplyer, more next).
The other is trough style points accumulation! What's all this? Well... in every race you get style points.. or at least the chance to earn them!

You earn them by using shortcuts, sliding, not hiting walls, and passing by other cars reaaaaaly close to them.
With other possible bonuses in other cases and race modes you start gathering them, and at a faster pace if you have a good reputation. As you suit up your vehicle visually you gain reputation, that grows in a sort of levels, each extra visual flare adding up to this, and with the levels it acts as a multiplyer to the style points you win in each race.

These style points however mainly are used only to unlock the vinyl layers. Those little neat flames everyone likes to see painted in their cars and such.

Car suiting aside, the game gives a few racing modes.
Normal laps, Sprint and Knockout as usual, but also features new things like Drag and Drift.

Drag is somewhat of a different thing, as you only need to focus on your RPM's in order to shift gears at the precise moment, as the only thing you need to worry is speed! If there are any turns in these races, the car is steered automatically, as your directional keys will only allow you to change the lane you car is on... and you just might wanna' do that, as you could have cars heading against you.

In Drift, you.... drift... In a certain circuit for a few laps you have to make your car skid and skid... trying to make the longest drifts possible to earn up points.

But, all these neat things now put on one side, there is always the second side.. the bad one.

I really don't have many complaints to make.. but 2 I have may be the only ones I get really annoyed about.
First one and in a least matter it's the sort of abrupt difficulty change in the AI cars... you can choose the difficulty level for each race, but, in the same difficulty level, on one race you might just do fine, but in the next one the opponets can tear you apart.

The second,but the most crucial, it's the seemingly bad and unfair physics system!!
Some of the things that happened to my car cannot be explained by words, but, easy is to say that sometimes minor touches on the walls can send your car flying for a seeming eternity, as the AI cars follow their paths happily EVEN when they hit the same targets and only with a slight diferrent angle and instead of flying they are just pushed slightly aside without much of a penalty to their speed.

A slight touch on a wall made my car roll over... a jump that made my car land on a ramp with about the same angle that my card had at the landing time made it jump and flip forward... and these are only little things that happened to me of a lot of less ''spectacular'' crashes caused by unknown reasons that led me to defeat.

GRAPHICS
If you have the hardware, this game posseses great graphics. The reflexes on the car and ground seem very detailed... there's a whole lot of ambience in the graphics that give it a more or less realistic feel.
If you don't good to stuff to run the graphics at max.. then.. it's something to measure up with most game of nowadays like Midnight Club 2.

SOUND/MUSIC
VROOOOOOOM!
Well.. the sound and noise is there!! Engines roaring like hell, that squeaky sound of the nitro firing up.. nothing bad to say about the FX... and not less about the music.
The game packs a few tracks, giving you the option to mute those you like less and selecting wich ones you hear where.

REPLAYABILITY
Online!!
Perhaps there it exists a salvation!! For offline, this game is bound to be short, as the underground mode doesn't last a eternity and after that, you've unlocked pretty much everything.
Hot Pursuit 2 here commended for the brilliant trees of challenges that rewarded you money for you to choose wich cars, tracks and track modes to unlock... instead of making you follow a ''campaign'' and give you everything at the end.

OVERALL
Need for Speed Underground is NOT a bad game, but, you better be ready to hold the pressure or cuss your heart out, because once you see the game making your life a hell of unfair tumblings you will understand how poor the phisics were implemented when a simple transport of HP2 would have nearly done!

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/29/03