Undercover is the last game of Need for Speed series (the 12^th part actually), a game that bears from the start the negative effects of an extremely exploited product. I am a Need for Speed fan since NFS II SE, and I played all the games since then, but I felt a go-down tendency of the series (in terms of quality) since Need for Speed Underground 2. As the financial factor had to be increased, the quality decreased significantly with every episode of the modern era, started with Need for Speed Underground. Most Wanted was the first modern product to bring back the police and the shivers of a cop chase, first time present in Need for Speed 3 Hot Pursuit, and the in Hot Pursuit II. The game had a cheesy story that involved some cheesy acting scenes with real persons, which gave it a funny feeling becoming a popular product. After Pro-Street was nothing else but a failure in terms of sellings, but not necessarily in terms of new ideas and concepts, EA needed fast a new product to revive the franchise. After listening to the fans requests regarding a new kind of Most Wanted, EA decided to somehow emulate the original Hot Pursuit concept recreating a Most Wanted experience with a Hollywood touch in terms of actors and production.

Cinematics

This is how they end up reconsidering the cinematic touch and therefore EA hired a couple of known actors to give life to the main characters in Undercover. Names like Maggie Q, Christina Milian, David Rees Snell (The Shield series), Kurt Caceres (Prison Break series) and Joshua Alba (Jessica Alba's brother), should have made a valuable cast, enough to offer a decent acting performance in order to recreate the key scenes from the game. As Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello stated before the official release of the game that the story and action has been inspired from many action movies including "The Transporter", there should have been enough ideas and inspiring material to conclude at least a "pop-corn" movie story. But they failed considerably. Every cinematic scene becomes gradually harder and harder to be viewed, because of the poor acting and the lack of purpose. Most of them are there just to justify the need of actors and to increase artificially the time amount of the gameplay.

Story

The game's story sets the player as an undercover police officer that has to infiltrate into the criminal gangs of Tri-City (the fictional city where the game is set). Most of these gangs are conducted by characters that have a taste for illegal races and beautiful women, so most of the time you need to race for them or against them to increase their trust in you. Your only contact with the police is federal officer Chase Linh, and later Lt. Jack M. Keller. Chase is the one that will encourage you to do dirty jobs for the mob's city like stealing cars, destroying the state properties, escaping the police, etc. All these for the sake of winning their trust. When the time comes you are able to take the most representative members down, by crashing their cars through the city's streets. Every "scenario" mission is translated into classic racing modes already present in earlier Need for Speed games. You get circuit, sprint, checkpoints, and highway races. Probably the new thing in all these racing modes would be the take-over missions in which you have to crash the opponent's car until you totaled it.

Police

Police is the main attraction in Undercover, and they make their presence from early missions. Either by car or by helicopter, they will hunt you like in Most Wanted by hitting you and making barricades. Their aggression is quite high at the beginning of the chase but it cools out rapidly if you resist a couple of minutes. They even use now PIT maneuvers (Pursuit Intervention Technique), by trying to push the back of your car while driving. But again those maneuvers will be used only in the beginning, and will totally be forgotten by the A.I. in the next couple of minutes. Probably more complex, the A.I. is definitely not enough aggressive to equal the moderate difficulty of Most Wanted. Even the opponent's A.I. tends to fade in aggressiveness if you win a couple of yards in front of them.