Need for Speed Underground 2
The underground has never been so enticing.
Published: December 19, 2004
EA's first Need for Speed Underground was a loose collection of different types of races strung together in a wholly linear fashion. It was damned addicting, however, and garnered such a following that it was one of the best selling-games of 2003 (right behind perennial favorites Madden and Pokemon). The sequel, on the other hand, wraps all those disparate racing bits, tosses them into a massive, free-roaming city, and tosses in a bit more story to string them together. It's also one of the best games of this year, and you need to play it.
NFSU2 picks up about six months after the , with a shadowy figure demanding that you join his collection of racing thugs or else... You pick the latter option, total your ride and end up in Bayview, a neon-lit ubermetropolis teeming with underground-yet-utterly-plentiful racing. You also hook up with Rachel (voiced by E! hottie Brooke Burke), and together the two of you go about taking over the city, you winning races, Rachel looking hot and posing in the handful of hand-painted comic book-style cutscenes tossed throughout the game while she skims a bit of the top from your winnings.
The races themselves are almost all carbon copies of the first game's offerings (Drift, Drag, Circuit and Sprint; get the deets on those in the first game's review), with the distinction of actually taking place in the same city you drive around in. There are a couple of basic exceptions, of course; drag races are set inside some of the areas you race around, sometimes just outside of the free-roaming city paths, and the all-new Street X (that's street cross in case you wanted to school some unknowing chumps) events take place out well outside of the normal city streets in enclosed areas like stadiums and parking lots.
The Street X events are tight, short runs around enclosed areas not unlike the drift courses, though they favor controlled, precise turns and smooth transitions between brake and gas -- probably the closest thing to a sim-style race the series has seen. They're unique in that they stress almost perfect runs to garner cash rewards (used to buy car upgrades) as well as the series' other big addition: respect.
Respect offers a couple things, most notably U.R.L. race opportunities. The Underground Racing League circuit races, once completed, help unlock new cars, but you only get them after earning enough respect. Respect comes from finishing well ahead of the other racers in the pack, and the larger the margin, the bigger the reward, which of course gets you to the U.R.L. races faster, and thus moves the game along.
In between the races, you can freely cruise the streets of the city (which is unlocked in bits), taking on challenges from other racers in choose-as-you-drive events called Outrun challenges. They're fun in that go-anywhere way, but beating challengers also unlock unique upgrades for your ride, from performance parts to unique body mods. The open city also hides a smattering of hidden shops (which unlock universal upgrades) from which you can buy new parts, add kit parts or deck out your ride with new accents. All these upgrades boost your car's visual rating, which in turn unlocks cover opportunities for DVDs and magazines.
The covers, as well as the U.R.L. and Drags, Circuits, Drifts, Street X and Sprints are all requirements for sponsorship races (all real companies like Sparco, Kenwood and Streetglow), which get you a signing bonus, a payout for all U.R.L. events and an extra slot in your garage for various cars. This opens up the ability to build and customize cars uniquely suited for each style of race; cars with better handling work best for Street X, Sprint and Circuit events, cars built for top speed and acceleration are more suited for Drag and Drift. It's a nice addition to things and helps you build a more well-rounded set of dream cars for your garage, which include just about every major foreign and domestic street racing car you could hope for.
All of this makes for a more or less constantly unlockable series of upgrades and advancements to the game, which progress as a pretty leisurely pace. It's not perfect, of course, you still have to drive from one part of the city to the next for some events like magazine covers and far-off races later in the game, and this can seem a little tedious (you're really only driving for a couple of minutes at most, though, and there are Outrun races to tackle along the way, though if you're behind, you'll usually end up well off the path you were taking to your ultimate destination).
At the game's core, though, is clean handling and challenging races that constantly scale with your upgrades. It also means you'll be racing a LOT, which, if you're not into it, can mean even more tedium on top of just getting around. It's the game's basic curse; you'll be able to race your brains out, but you'll have to race your brains out, and there are some runs that just get to be a bit of a chore after a while. They almost always turn into rewards, of course, but after you get the 50th SMS message, brought to you of course by Cingular, telling you to pick your latest reward a few minutes' drive away, during which you'll pass by a half dozen Burger Kings and Best Buys, it does wear one down.
If anything, though, the visuals punch through with the most lasting appeal. This is, hands-down one of the coolest worlds I've ever explored. Granted, there anything to it beyond what you can drive through, but it's just so damned slick, rife with neon and searchlights (which incidentally can be seen from the very tops of the city's picturesque vantage points as you scream down the Roppongi-like mountain paths at 100mph. It's been a long time since I said this, but I would absolutely love to live in this world, caught up in all the exhaust and sculpted carbon fiber blur it surrounds.
It also runs at a surprisingly smooth clip. Given all the effects present, the motion-blurred streets and buildings, the light trails on street lamps and tail lights, the orange and blue hues that overtake the screen as rainfall comes (finally giving an explanation to the series' eternally wet pavement and adding the extra challenge of a lack of traction while it rains -- though it mysteriously disappears the seconds the clouds part), it all runs with a smoothness you wouldn't expect. Sure, the game does drop to some choppy bits, and runs at a dangerously stuttery framerate, but its almost never a situation where it affects your racing.
The sound works both ways, with the effects during crashes where you can feel the crunch of splintering fiberglass composite and shattering glass with every hit and the throaty, roaring engines more than satisfying the need for an on-screen complement to the visuals, but a mediocre soundtrack with too little electronica and too much rap and angsty screaming nu-metal taking the fore. Luckily, if you kill the music early on, you'll get full exposure to the superlative sound effects -- even the ambient effects in the body and performance shops, with their dropped wrenches and light conversations, would probably be missed if you had the music on all the time.
This is just an amazing racing game, pure and simple. Burnout 3 offers pure balls-to-the-wall speed and Gran Tourismo feeds the need for a perfect simulation of what racing's really like, but NFSU2 balances the two so perfectly, it's almost scary. The gearheads will get a basic fix with the upgrades, the speed freaks will be fed pure adrenaline, and everyone else will find out exactly why these kids feel the need to drop 20 grand on a baseline car that could've get nearly the same performance if they were just bought stock from a more racing-focused manufacturer.
Much like the whole process of tweaking and upgrading a car to make it look as good as it performs, the import and mod scenes, and the whole car lust lifestyle, NFSU2's appeal lies in how it slowly takes you over, how the pursuit of those few extra horses and bit of flash while it's revving at the line means as much as how well you finish. This is a heady, sexy mix of racing bliss that absolutely cannot be missed. Sure, there's a bit of tedium in the running around, but it's a whole hell of a lot more than you'd get trying to run around yourself, and for a first effort at something this all-encompassing, it's as good a result as you could possibly hope for.
I do still hope for better things, of course; actually explaining what all these mods do and really getting into the actual tuner culture beyond the big brands and major manufacturers would have been nice, as would have the option for racing for pinks in a sort of Motor City Online way. But what is present is so damned good that I can't help but tell anyone remotely interested in racing to grab this game in a heartbeat, and if you aren't, well, this is probably the game that will convert you.
NFSU2 picks up about six months after the , with a shadowy figure demanding that you join his collection of racing thugs or else... You pick the latter option, total your ride and end up in Bayview, a neon-lit ubermetropolis teeming with underground-yet-utterly-plentiful racing. You also hook up with Rachel (voiced by E! hottie Brooke Burke), and together the two of you go about taking over the city, you winning races, Rachel looking hot and posing in the handful of hand-painted comic book-style cutscenes tossed throughout the game while she skims a bit of the top from your winnings.
The races themselves are almost all carbon copies of the first game's offerings (Drift, Drag, Circuit and Sprint; get the deets on those in the first game's review), with the distinction of actually taking place in the same city you drive around in. There are a couple of basic exceptions, of course; drag races are set inside some of the areas you race around, sometimes just outside of the free-roaming city paths, and the all-new Street X (that's street cross in case you wanted to school some unknowing chumps) events take place out well outside of the normal city streets in enclosed areas like stadiums and parking lots.
The Street X events are tight, short runs around enclosed areas not unlike the drift courses, though they favor controlled, precise turns and smooth transitions between brake and gas -- probably the closest thing to a sim-style race the series has seen. They're unique in that they stress almost perfect runs to garner cash rewards (used to buy car upgrades) as well as the series' other big addition: respect.
Respect offers a couple things, most notably U.R.L. race opportunities. The Underground Racing League circuit races, once completed, help unlock new cars, but you only get them after earning enough respect. Respect comes from finishing well ahead of the other racers in the pack, and the larger the margin, the bigger the reward, which of course gets you to the U.R.L. races faster, and thus moves the game along.
In between the races, you can freely cruise the streets of the city (which is unlocked in bits), taking on challenges from other racers in choose-as-you-drive events called Outrun challenges. They're fun in that go-anywhere way, but beating challengers also unlock unique upgrades for your ride, from performance parts to unique body mods. The open city also hides a smattering of hidden shops (which unlock universal upgrades) from which you can buy new parts, add kit parts or deck out your ride with new accents. All these upgrades boost your car's visual rating, which in turn unlocks cover opportunities for DVDs and magazines.
The covers, as well as the U.R.L. and Drags, Circuits, Drifts, Street X and Sprints are all requirements for sponsorship races (all real companies like Sparco, Kenwood and Streetglow), which get you a signing bonus, a payout for all U.R.L. events and an extra slot in your garage for various cars. This opens up the ability to build and customize cars uniquely suited for each style of race; cars with better handling work best for Street X, Sprint and Circuit events, cars built for top speed and acceleration are more suited for Drag and Drift. It's a nice addition to things and helps you build a more well-rounded set of dream cars for your garage, which include just about every major foreign and domestic street racing car you could hope for.
All of this makes for a more or less constantly unlockable series of upgrades and advancements to the game, which progress as a pretty leisurely pace. It's not perfect, of course, you still have to drive from one part of the city to the next for some events like magazine covers and far-off races later in the game, and this can seem a little tedious (you're really only driving for a couple of minutes at most, though, and there are Outrun races to tackle along the way, though if you're behind, you'll usually end up well off the path you were taking to your ultimate destination).
At the game's core, though, is clean handling and challenging races that constantly scale with your upgrades. It also means you'll be racing a LOT, which, if you're not into it, can mean even more tedium on top of just getting around. It's the game's basic curse; you'll be able to race your brains out, but you'll have to race your brains out, and there are some runs that just get to be a bit of a chore after a while. They almost always turn into rewards, of course, but after you get the 50th SMS message, brought to you of course by Cingular, telling you to pick your latest reward a few minutes' drive away, during which you'll pass by a half dozen Burger Kings and Best Buys, it does wear one down.
If anything, though, the visuals punch through with the most lasting appeal. This is, hands-down one of the coolest worlds I've ever explored. Granted, there anything to it beyond what you can drive through, but it's just so damned slick, rife with neon and searchlights (which incidentally can be seen from the very tops of the city's picturesque vantage points as you scream down the Roppongi-like mountain paths at 100mph. It's been a long time since I said this, but I would absolutely love to live in this world, caught up in all the exhaust and sculpted carbon fiber blur it surrounds.
It also runs at a surprisingly smooth clip. Given all the effects present, the motion-blurred streets and buildings, the light trails on street lamps and tail lights, the orange and blue hues that overtake the screen as rainfall comes (finally giving an explanation to the series' eternally wet pavement and adding the extra challenge of a lack of traction while it rains -- though it mysteriously disappears the seconds the clouds part), it all runs with a smoothness you wouldn't expect. Sure, the game does drop to some choppy bits, and runs at a dangerously stuttery framerate, but its almost never a situation where it affects your racing.
The sound works both ways, with the effects during crashes where you can feel the crunch of splintering fiberglass composite and shattering glass with every hit and the throaty, roaring engines more than satisfying the need for an on-screen complement to the visuals, but a mediocre soundtrack with too little electronica and too much rap and angsty screaming nu-metal taking the fore. Luckily, if you kill the music early on, you'll get full exposure to the superlative sound effects -- even the ambient effects in the body and performance shops, with their dropped wrenches and light conversations, would probably be missed if you had the music on all the time.
This is just an amazing racing game, pure and simple. Burnout 3 offers pure balls-to-the-wall speed and Gran Tourismo feeds the need for a perfect simulation of what racing's really like, but NFSU2 balances the two so perfectly, it's almost scary. The gearheads will get a basic fix with the upgrades, the speed freaks will be fed pure adrenaline, and everyone else will find out exactly why these kids feel the need to drop 20 grand on a baseline car that could've get nearly the same performance if they were just bought stock from a more racing-focused manufacturer.
Much like the whole process of tweaking and upgrading a car to make it look as good as it performs, the import and mod scenes, and the whole car lust lifestyle, NFSU2's appeal lies in how it slowly takes you over, how the pursuit of those few extra horses and bit of flash while it's revving at the line means as much as how well you finish. This is a heady, sexy mix of racing bliss that absolutely cannot be missed. Sure, there's a bit of tedium in the running around, but it's a whole hell of a lot more than you'd get trying to run around yourself, and for a first effort at something this all-encompassing, it's as good a result as you could possibly hope for.
I do still hope for better things, of course; actually explaining what all these mods do and really getting into the actual tuner culture beyond the big brands and major manufacturers would have been nice, as would have the option for racing for pinks in a sort of Motor City Online way. But what is present is so damned good that I can't help but tell anyone remotely interested in racing to grab this game in a heartbeat, and if you aren't, well, this is probably the game that will convert you.
