![]() This makes Undercover a more conventional racing experience than, say, Midnight Club: Los Angeles – really its main competitor. The circuits, you see, are set on the streets but they're enclosed. There's one other major issue we had with Undercover, and the more we analyse it the harder it becomes for us to believe that everyone involved in this project missed it. It might have even have worked if this weren't a simple remake. ![]() We like that, and if nothing else it proves that somewhere, someone along the way wanted (wants?) Undercover to look and act like the digital equivalent of a summer car chase blockbuster. Undercover does that neat, Race Driver: GRID caper of installing you directly into a car after a few swooping, mood-setting shots of the city and some obligatory choppers buzzing in low over the bay. The presentation is the kind of vapid stuff that would give Michael Bay a semi, but it's very slick nonetheless, even if it is just window dressing. Rockstar's City of Angels is far more vibrant and flamboyant. Undercover feels larger than Midnight Club: Los Angeles but looks positively sterile in comparison. The cities are markedly bigger than they've been in the past and are connected by wide freeways and winding roads, but bigger is not always better. A word to the wise - if you're going undercover, choose a subtle freaking car. This isn't FIFA though, and we need a few more reasons to get on board than a couple of under-the-hood tweaks. Credit where credit is due, tricks like these aren't simply a matter of wrenching the wheel and waiting for the game to detect you're trying to do something cool, they do require some skill (even if we didn't find many reasons to use them). Doing a 720, for instance, requires you to rip the handbrake and turn hard in one direction, slam it in reverse and fling the wheels in the opposite direction once you hit 90 degrees, before giving it the beans and counter steering again as the car swings through 270 degrees. Nailing special precision driving moves like J-turns and 720s at speed requires some surprisingly deft controller massaging, so there's a new depth to the handling model that NFS titles just haven't enjoyed in the past. There's a welcome sense of weight to the cars, and while straddling the gulf between arcade and simulation is usually near impossible, Undercover just about pulls it off. Sure, the new Heroic Driving Engine impresses – Undercover is probably the best handling NFS game we've played. It certainly begs the question: Exactly what's new here? The answer is, hardly enough. We also heard all this three years ago too – the police radio chatter, which is admittedly eerily authentic, sounds more or less identical to the vox pops from Most Wanted. Sure, they're still impressively passionate about stopping you and use a bunch of neat tricks to try and do so, but we saw all this three years ago. We not exaggerating when we say the cops have been plucked directly from Most Wanted. The cannibalisation of former NFS titles doesn't stop there though. While we're on the topic, unfortunately it'll likely come as no surprise that no Australian cars feature either (local rides have been absent, technically, since Underground 2) so you can pretty much stash any hopes of fanging around the streets in the world-class HSV W427 or a classic GTHO Phase III. So it would seem that stuffing Undercover with cars was easy – they're just cloned from last year's version. It's not long, though, before you begin to realise that we saw almost every car here last year, either on the Need for Speed ProStreet disc itself or released shortly afterwards as DLC. Even the much-vaunted Bugatti Veyron, currently the fastest accelerating and decelerating production car in the world, makes an appearance. It's not too shabby, and there's a great range. Run through the selection of cars, for instance. However, when you break Undercover down to its parts the shortcuts begin to show. We don't want to trivialise the amount of work that obviously goes into building a fully functional videogame – it's not our intention to sound like spoilt children asking why the Christmas stocking is only half full. We just can't see what it is about Undercover that has kept Black Box busy for 12 months. The biggest problem with Undercover is located just under the surface sheen, and it strikes at the very core of the game. But here's the rub – the skidmarks from Most Wanted haven't even faded and Black Box are bringing us a carbon copy of it. The racing is fast and fun (freeway races are a real highlight, seriously). It's a simple formula, but it generally works. The game itself is fairly straightforward.
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