Undercover is the last game of Need for Speed series (the 12th 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.
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Gameplay Features
But most of the time you will compete in those already known races because EA introduced a RPG leveling system which provides access to new missions only after completing a number of desired events. The system is based on driving points which can be used automatically increasing some driving attributes. But you won't notice any changes in your driving and it's hard to believe that this trick has been included to influence the gameplay but more to add a useless feature to the content. The good thing is that the races are short, ranging from 20 seconds up to maximum 5 minutes and although Undercover features the most wide area map from the whole Need for Speed series, you can jump directly to the races without exploring the city streets. So who cares that you have 80 miles of open world roads, when you can automatically jump from event to event. Depending on your position the GPS can point you to the closest event. You can choose either by jumping directly to this one or by accessing the GPS map from which you can choose whatever event you want.
What would be a street racing game without customization options. And what would be Need for Speed without its specific one. It won't be the same, that's for sure. Undercover customization system is based on Need for Speed: ProStreet and Carbon episodes. You will get all the options including the Autosculpt which is present also on all the Aftermarket kits. But there are no detailed modifications. Everything is based on an elementary drop-down menu from which you will choose the right parts and tuning parameters. There are no more official brands listed here, except the car models, so a simple list will do all the changes for an upgrade. The cars are again separated in Japanese, European and American classes divided by tiers based on mechanical characteristics. Although every car features different mechanical characteristics, the differences between them are slightly visible, the speed and acceleration being the most differentiated attributes. The whole physics engine is an improved version of ProStreet, adding only a dynamic camera and the ability of doing easily 180 and 360 degrees turns, just by pushing the handbreak and the right direction. The damage system has been visually kept, but it won't influence the car's handling in the race. After the end of the race the car will be respawned to its initially state. Although there is a chance to totaled the car if you hit hard enough a wall or a bridgehead.
There is a slightly improvement in terms of graphics regarding the colors pallette, but overall the graphics design remains the same as in Most Wanted. Undercover goes back to the flashy graphics style, present in Underground, Underground 2, and Carbon but based on the midday and sunny atmosphere from Most Wanted.
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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.