"Fun, but could be better."

The basic plot of this game, I think, is that you're an undercover agent trying to bust some drug thing... so you sign up to work for the bad guys as a driver so you can end up catching them. and the police don't know that you're actually a cop, so they chase you the whole way. The story mode is pretty fun,but can get really frustrating at times. It's a very difficult game to master, even the first level is overly difficult.

Gameplay
Fun, but hard. That's the short answer. For the actual single player story mode, most missions involve getting somewhere in a certain amount of time. Things are made more difficult by the seemingly endless barrage of cop cars that come speeding your way. The way the game works is that you have two meters: a Felony meter and a Damage meter. The Felony meter fills up the more illegal things you do. The damage meter fills up as you smash your car. When your damage meter maxes out, the game is over (though it resets every level). If your felony meter maxes out, there are so many police on you that your game might as well be over, unless you're a skilled player.

The other modes are fun, but I get the most entertainment out of simply driving around, running away from police, and discovering new glitches, secrets, and executing cool jumps, etc.

One thing that I really like about this game is the video editor. If you do something that's just really, really awesome (like a front flip or a double back flip off some hill or poor passing motorist) you can go into the video editor, cut together a nice replay of it (choosing camera angles, etc) and save it so you can show all your friends just how awesome you are.

I don't think this game was finished. There are so many glitches that it must have been rushed or poorly tested. It's terribly easy to get outside of levels, especially with the fast cars cheat on or when using the fastest car in the game. The major problem with this game is the glitches. They rarely interfere with gameplay, but it can be really annoying to be driving along and then just get shot out of the level for no apparent reason. I'd give this a 10, but the glitches subtract one and the difficulty subtracts another.

The difficulty: Maybe it's just me, but it took me about 45 minutes to complete the training mission. And you can't do anything until you complete that. It involves rushing around a parking garage and pulling a bunch of various maneuvers for a minute. It's really, really difficult. Then, from about halfway through the game on, the missions become more and more impossible. The last few are doable, but each one will probably take an hour or so of practice. And it's not fun difficulty, it's frustrating difficulty, and the weak plot doesn't help anything.

The sounds are good, the graphics are not great, even on the highest settings, but the game was also made about 10 years ago, so one shouldn't complain.

This is a fun game to just pick up and play, I recommend just driving around with (or without) cheats on, because that is almost always more entertaining than the missions themselves. I doubt this game is more than 10 dollars any more, so if you have a laptop, you might pick it up... it's a good game to play here and there, but on a desktop computer, I almost always get the feeling that I could be doing something a lot better with my time. I mostly found time to play this on the school bus or before driver's ed class... never for a terribly long period of time.

It's good.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/31/05