Conclusion

Overall Undercover is a low quality product because of its repetitiveness, cheesy cinematics, and lack of purpose in gameplay. It's another product that suffers from a short development process caused by two alternate development cycles between two games from the same franchise in order to obtain a product every year.

Gameplay: 62

The gameplay is just another huge collection of old and classic racing modes which have no purpose after awhile in completing them. The driving attributes and the experience level prove just a trick to make the player continue playing, but they have no other effect but unblocking newer missions which in general are the same as the ones already completed.

Graphics: 80

Heroic Driving Engine is nothing else but a remastered edition of the old graphical engines, from the past, having its roots based on the ProStreet one. The series goes back to the old-fashioned but still flashy graphics style. Adding the damage system from ProStreet and combining the sunny and midday atmosphere from Most Wanted, Undercover looks good. Again the developers did a great job by recreating the car's models, using real parameters from all the manufacturers present in the game. The game features a quite high-rated A.I. which is able to do complex maneuvers, but it has been "tamed" by the developers to increase the access of many more novice players. Undercover is definitely a game for everyone.

Multiplayer: 79

Beginning with Carbon, Need for Speed series lost the gamers attention in terms of multiplayer mode. Other games from the racing scene have already overpassed the number of players online present in Need for Speed games. And Undercover makes no exception. The multiplayer mode features every event already available in singleplayer, plus Cops 'n' Robbers, in which the player can be either a cop or a robber. The robber has to deliver a package to the dropping point, while the cop has to stop the robbers from doing this. The whole multiplayer mode is based on the Live service from Microsoft for both Windows and XBOX 360 platforms. Probably the XBOX users will populate much more quickly the online mode being also attracted by the achievements present in XBOX 360 version of the game.

Sound: 82

In my opinion every Need for Speed game featured the best racing-game sound at its time. And Undercover is another one that continues this destiny. Although I'm not sure that the real models actually sound like in the game. But real or just recreated, every engine sounds great. Interesting that the soundtrack has been limited to a couple of main tracks, no option being available to choose or change the playlist.

Hardware: 75

Is a much more stable game compared to ProStreet, having less visual bugs. The game looks in some places as it would use lower textures than in ProStreet, which might be an explanation of a more fluid fps. But there are some unexplained moments when the framerate drops with no excuse making the gameplay experience much more difficult than you would expect. These moments disappear as fast as they appear.