Oh dear.
Reviewing Need for Speed: Undercover on the N-Gage is going to prove tricky. A reviewer's role is relatively easy when they really like a game, and it generates strong emotion. It's also easy (but with decidedly careful editing) when you have a strong disapproval on a title.
Need for Speed: Undercover falls squarely in the middle of those two camps. It's Meh; it's average; it's middle of the road (pardon the pun); it just isn't... exciting. And that's one of the worst crimes that any game can commit.
Let's reverse up a little bit. Need for Speed is a long running driving game franchise by Electronic Arts, and this is the first appearance on the N-Gage system. Like many EA games, there have been yearly releases, each with a theme – Undercover is the 2009 theme, although fans of the series will realise that the idea of taking on various street gangs in zones of the cities feels more like Need for Speed: Underground Rivals than Undercover.
After the useful, if a touch bland, tutorial when you first run the game, you're given the choice of either a quick race (which takes you straight into the action), or to start an ongoing game with the career mode, which is where the meat of the game is.
Starting a new career sees you with a rather average car (the classic boy racer's Volkswagen R32) and a handful of dollars you can spend on upgrades to the car. Your career is very much a hidden one, taking on the street gangs in various suburbs of the city. And you take them on in the only way that boys know how – street racing.
There are a variety of styles of racing, from point to point races and circuit style, multiple lap races, to racking up as much damage as possible in the streets or ramming police cars off the road. On paper (well, text), it makes for a fascinating game.
Unfortunately, sluggish controls and barely adequate graphics do their best to inhibit what could be a very nice game. Starting with the graphics - the opening of each race begins with a very nice camera pan around the road and past all the racers in this event – think the sort of shots you see in a car review on Top Gear, or the Fast and the Furious films. Then the camera settles behind the car and away you go.
Your car turns very, very quickly on the screen, it's one of the slippiest cars I've ever seen, and it's not unusual to see a 45 or 60 degree angle to your direction of travel on screen. That's crazy, and doesn't at all match up to how the car is heading round a gentle corner. To keep your speed up, you have the option to drift (power-slide) around the longer corner, and this brings up a little bar where you have to balance an indicator in the green section to maintain the drift and not spin it. This helps keep the speed up, but again the car angle on screen looks crazy in a bad way.
Roadside graphics are functional at best, with reasonable textures for a non-graphics accelerated game. I know I've argued before that the N-Gage doesn't need hardware acceleration, but I wonder if the EA designers who expect this in devices like the PSP are relying too much on the hardware to lift up the visuals rather than using tighter and more compact coding?
It's also tough to build up any emotional attachment to the city. This is a weird thing to explain, but in other versions of Undercover (and I'm drawing on my time with the PSP version) you still had the same point to point races and other scenarios, but you knew you were in the same city, you recognised patches of road, sequences of turns, and generally you felt like you were in a real place. There's no such familiarity in the N-Gage version, and the design of the courses is sterile – lots of 90 degree corners with long straights between them. It feels more like a Scalextric set than an actual location.
Part of you might be thinking that this is the best N-Gage can do, and that's how portable racing games will be. Well you're wrong, because I can remember Colin McRae Rally on the original N-Gage. Less memory, less CPU power, smaller screen size, but a far more visual game, one that led you to believe you were going just a touch too fast, with very accurate controls. There's simply no excuse for Need for Speed Undercover on the N-Gage to be so... average!
For a driving game, this title commits the ultimate sin. It does not feel fast, there is no sense of speed at all. And there's a nagging feeling that your car has just enough power in every race to catch up and overtake your opponents, no matter what mistakes you make early in the run.
This is unfortunate, as Undercover has some nice points. The variance of the type of driving missions you have to do stops the game being a simple “grind out the laps”; the ability to slowly upgrade your car by spending your prize money on new components lends an RPG like feel to the game – do you go for small upgrades over time or save up to get a brand new car being just one background choice.
And for those who like to get the "100% completed" check mark in these games (which is encouraged by the N-Gage points arena) Undercover has just enough “one more go” in it to let you forgive the graphics and lack of fluidity.
Need for Speed is very much a missed opportunity. There is a really good game in here, but the developers need more time to polish the graphics and handling and understand the differences in the N-Gage platform. If EA bring the franchise back to N-Gage in 2010 and the developers tweak this engine, rather than start from scratch, then I have high hopes that a second iteration will give us a classy arcade driving game. For now, by all means grab the demo and see what you think. This will appeal to some, but it's not a title I would recommend across the board.
AAN Score: 59%
-- Ewan Spence, March 2009