Review by Jonathan Nicklen.
Periodically, yet another multi-console Need For Speed title is released. Undercover is an example of how it shouldn’t be done. The Wii version of this title is another failed attempt at a driving game with the wheel when Nintendo had already cracked it with Mario Kart Wii last year.
The story for Undercover can very simply be told in a short sentence: "Race to be the best." While the game does have its own story, it ends up being mundane and poorly planned out. It’s ignorable at its best. When it comes to the cutscenes, the game throws out a shoddy live action clip which is fairly pitiable. The acting is not necessarily bad, but neither is it good. They are best described as below average.
When it comes to gameplay, it is just fault after fault in an almost never ending sequence of bugs and bad programming. The control methods are varied, but in order to actually control the vehicle there is no choice but to use the Gamecube or Classic Controller options. The handling is unresponsive and crude, as if each car has had its axles bent out of shape. Then there is the collision detection. One would expect to slow down a little bit upon scraping a wall at a slight angle. Undercover expects that you come to a complete halt. The game is so plagued by bad collision physics that it’s hard to believe that it even made it past testing.
The problems don’t stop there. When driving around the freeways and main roads, it is hard not to notice something almost missing. Where is all the traffic? There is the odd car bumbling along every now and then, but this only seems normal on small back roads. On a major freeway, it is expected that there is traffic. Too much traffic, of course, wouldn't help, because it would be impossible to drive through, but when there is almost no traffic on a normally busy intersection, the sense of realism is completely lost. Sometimes there aren’t any cars at all, until one magically appears out of thin air. Yes, other cars will randomly appear when you get close to them, as if you couldn’t see them when they were twenty yards away.
This poor sense of distance is appalling to see in a modern game. The loading times for vehicles and other distant objects is almost as slow as the loading times from early disc based games. Picture this scenario: you are driving along at 100+ MPH on a seemingly empty road. A car suddenly poofs into existence, the edge of it scrapes your vehicle at a slight angle and then your car comes to a complete halt due to bad collision physics.
The free roaming map that was introduced in Underground 2 makes a return in Undercover after being strangely absent in Pro Street. Being able to pick an event and drive to it, taking any path that is available, is certainly promising. That is, until the menu navigation screws it over. In the menu a location can be picked on the map and the game will automatically take you there. That is right, the game will actually take the player to an event without them having to do anything. You can avoid every police chase and completely ignore the exploration previous titles employed throughout the whole game.
It’s hard to think of anything good to say about Undercover, but there are a few good points. The soundtrack is very diverse and is exceptionally well-chosen for the game. The number of events is also reasonable. However, given the flaws Undercover has, these are not nearly enough to rescue this doomed title.
