Super Adventures in Delisted Racing Games Part 2: Need for Speed: Undercover

This week on Super Adventures, I'm still writing about racing games you can't buy digitally anymore. I was inspired by The Crew being shut down earlier this year, as it got me thinking about all the other racing games that have just disappeared over the years. Well okay, most of them are still in someone's game library, they still work (unlike The Crew), but you won't find them on the PlayStation store or on Steam.

It's a problem that affects this genre more than most because of all the licenced cars and music. Those licences have a time limit and when that's up the game can't be sold anymore. As far as I can tell, the first 18 Need for Speed games are all either gone now or never were, unless you can find them on disc, with only 2010's Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit getting a remastered rerelease. And playing PC games off a disc has only become more of a pain in the ass over time.

Fortunately, I was able to buy a few of them before they vanished. In fact, I've already written about the first 10 years of Need for Speed games, going from Need for Speed to Underground, so now would be a good time for me to cover the absolute highlight of the sixth gen console era: the original Need for Speed: Most Wanted from 2005!

I can't be bothered going through the hassle of installing it though, so instead I'm downloading one of the most hated games in the series: 2008's Need for Speed: Undercover!

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Developer:

EA Black Box

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Release Date:

2008

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Systems:

Win, PS2, PS3, X360, Wii, PSP, DS, phones

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Alright then, next it's Need for Speed: Undercover, sponsored by T-Mobile. No online requirement on this one, so even though was delisted on PC in 2021 I can still play my copy as much as I like.

It apparently stuck around for longer on the Xbox 360 marketplace, but the purchase link is missing for me at the moment and the whole store is getting shut down on July 29th, so things don't look good. Maybe look for a boxed copy instead, that'll still work.

Need for Speed: Undercover was the 12th Need for Speed game and the 4th on seventh generation consoles like the Xbox 360. There were putting them out yearly at this point, so you can get 10 of them on the 360 alone, and that doesn't even count Need for Speed: Nitro, released for Nintendo systems, and Need for Speed: World, which was a PC MMO a bit like The Crew... until it got shut down.

The game was meant to be a fan-pleasing return to the Fast and the Furious-inspired Most Wanted formula after Pro Street took a detour into legal racing. The fans weren't all that pleased by how it turned out though. It may not be the worst NFS ever but it often makes the shortlist.

I haven't played any other racing games from the era recently to compare this to, but these have to be good graphics for 2008. Well, aside from the excessive bloom and some occasional glitchiness with the shadows. I think that's always been there in the PC game, it's not just a side effect of me playing this in 2024, but I could be wrong. Plus I didn't have any trouble getting it to run in a more modern widescreen 1080p. (If you click the screenshot you'll see a downscaled 720p version, but that's basically what it looks like with anti-aliasing on).

I also haven't played any Need for Speed games from the era recently, but this definitely has that NFS feel I remember. The handling is semi-realistic and you do need to break for the sharper corners... or at least take your finger off the accelerator for a moment.

Every few races you get a live action cutscene, in real live action sets! You get the standard Need for Speed characters hanging around their cars, but more often than not it's a message from your boss, Inspector Chase Linh, played by Maggie Q. I get a bit of a femme fatale vibe from her, probably because she's mostly shot in close ups. The director was determined to make sitting in an apartment alone with a laptop look sexy.

Her conversations are very one-sided though, as the player doesn't talk back or appear in the videos. The Crew's player character, Alex, was clearly the star of that story, but here you don't really have a character at all. You definitely don't get you choose your appearance or select dialogue or anything like that. You don't even get the option to skip cutscenes! Well, unless you retry a race, then you can skip the intro you've already seen. Mercifully.

This is something like the third Need for Speed game to feature an open world to drive in, and it was the biggest yet. The game map isn't anywhere near as big as The Crew's, but it is still pretty huge for a racing game. Like The Crew, I can drive anywhere I want right from the start and explore the world. But those red dots are the available races and there's no fast travel, so there's no real point in leaving the first city until the game takes me somewhere new.

I can instantly begin any race on the map by clicking on it, there's no need to drive over to them this time. But that isn't even the quickest way of starting the next race. I just press the 'next race' button from inside the car. It makes being able to drive around the open world entirely pointless, but the convenience of it may be worth the trade-off.

If all you feel like is racing, you can go from the end of one race to the start of the next race instantly with the press of a single button. Race, race, race, race, with the only interruptions being the little cutscenes of the cars driving up and the screen showing your points afterwards. Well, unless Inspector Linh's got something unskippable to say.

The game features a similar variety of races as The Crew, with circuits, sprints, checkpoints and takedowns, but it does have a few modes of its own.

Like there's Highway Battle, where you go head-to-head with another racer on a road which has some actual traffic on it for a change. Plus it switches to bumper cam (because the game doesn't have a cockpit view with a dashboard) and plays some dramatic Battlestar Galactica drums to make it extra tense. There's also Outrun, where you're given the freedom of the whole map and are able to go anywhere as long as you stay ahead of the other driver. The trick there is to stay close as you're approaching a junction and then quickly swerve to take a different route.

No Canyon races in this one though, so Need for Speed fans who got frustrated with Need for Speed: Carbon could appreciate that at least. And I can appreciate the lack of drift or drag races, because I suck at them.

Completing races builds Wheelman rep and if I dominated the race I also get a tiny increase to one of my driver skills. This is a lot like the upgrades in The Crew, except less annoying because the screen only comes up when I've completed a race, not while I'm driving down a road full of traffic.

I've been finding it very easy to dominate most races, so I've been filling up all these bars. It hasn't made any perceptible difference to gameplay and I haven't been given any choices about where I want to put my points, but hey it's nice to get a reward. It's even nicer when I reach a race that gives me a choice of pink slips. I can buy cars, but free cars are cheaper.

There are three different tiers of upgrades for each car, so you can improve the engine, suspension etc. and you don't even need to travel across the US to the correct shop first, so it's got The Crew beat there. But I had more fun giving my cars a makeover.

This isn't the most sophisticated car editor I've seen in a game, but you can choose any paint colour and finish and paint different regions separately. You can swap in different bumpers and hoods. Plus it has a ridiculous number of wheels to pick from. Ridiculous, because there are no preview images and it takes a second or two for each to load. You could spend minutes just browsing wheels, I wouldn't recommend it.

You can also play around with vinyls... after you've bought them. It's a two-step process for some reason.

I couldn't see any under car neons, so the game's left that part of Need for Speed behind, but it brought back Need for Speed: Carbon's Autosculpt feature. This lets you adjust sliders to make minor changes to the shape of things like wheels and bumpers. I can't really show it off in a screenshot and honestly I could barely see what had changed in game either. It's a nice feature though and it's a shame this was apparently the last game in the series to have it.

Car cosmetics serve a purpose in gameplay as changing a car's look reduces its 'heat', which presumably affects how much attention you get from cops. I must got gotten it too high as one time the cops came after me while I was just sitting there parked.

Another thing the game has in common with The Crew is that there are cops around and you can listen in on them what they're saying to each other. They got the colour of my car right! Well, alright they said it was a 'brown Barracuda' instead of yellow, but close enough.

There are a lot of mission types that involve cops, like sometimes I have to do a certain value of damage, sometimes I have to trash a certain number of cars, and sometimes I just have to evade them while delivering a stolen car to a garage. It's been getting harder over time and I think that's because I've upgraded my Wheelman level. Now I'm being chased by K-9 vans that can outrun a Bugatti Veyron and it's damaging my immersion!

Fortunately the city is full of disasters waiting to happen that will give the cops something else to think about. If I come across one of these 'pursuit breakers' I can drop girders or a giant sign onto the pursuing vehicles, breaking their pursuit. This gives me a chance to go get my car into one of the hiding places marked on the minimap. Or to just stay out of sight for a bit and wait for the other cops to give up.

Unfortunately the cutscenes pretty much always look terrible. It's rare that the cop cars actually get caught by whatever's coming down and one time a sign actually fell the wrong way and didn't land in the street. Still does the job though, thankfully.

The real problem with these things is there's never one on my minimap when I need it. Sure they're quite common, but I often have to open the proper map, look for where they are, and figure out my route.

The cutscenes when you get busted are great though. There are a ton of them, featuring some proper police brutality against your poor undercover cop. Sometimes the cops even have some doughnuts afterwards and throw them at you. My favourite is the one where the protagonist tries to steal one of their vans and they're kicking the windscreen trying to get him back out.

Every time you get busted it adds a strike to your car. Three strikes and the car gets impounded, forever. Your best car, your unique paint job, your upgrades, all gone. It takes a lot of races to afford a good car and even more to upgrade it, so ideally you don't want this to happen!

Fortunately you can replay previous races from the map to earn money, so losing your fastest car doesn't mean you've hit a dead end. I just wish it was easier to see how much money they each pay out, as getting a new Dodge Challenger R/T costs $115,000 and $250 races aren't going to help much. Though I never really reached a point where the game was showering me with rewards. By the end of the story I'd played for 12 hours, completed 131 out of 187 events, had $666,165 in the bank, and owned just 6 cars.

By the way, the roads you can drive on are blue, just ignore all those other ones, they don't really exist. Honestly, when you're driving around you don't even notice how much of the map you can't get to.

Another problem is that the game doesn't tell you what tier car you should bring for an event, so you can end up in a race you can't possibly win... or more likely, a race where you're so far ahead you'll never see another car once you've turned the first corner.

Like The Crew I think all damage is basically superficial and you can't actually destroy your vehicle during a race. Well, almost all damage. It turns out that cop chases get less fun when you hit a spike strip, blow your tires and can't drive away anymore, even if the glowing sparks are pretty. You can see that red meter at the bottom middle of the screen filling up as the cops surround me to take my Dodge away.

By the way, if you're into staring at glowing lights, this is the game for you, as the sun has never looked more like a giant nuclear explosion. The game has some variety of locations, with its cities, small towns, industrial areas and hills, but wherever you go it always looks like this. Perpetual daylight with excessive bloom and a 2010s-era piss-filter.

It also feels a bit unfinished somehow. It doesn't seem to have the same level of polish or style that earlier Need for Speed titles had, probably because games overall were taking longer and longer to make and poor Black Box were still tasked with churning these out in less than two years.

The game was the product of an overworked team that was pushed to get it done far too quickly, so it's no surprise that it couldn't even match the quality of its predecessors, never mind its rivals. Personally though, I enjoyed playing it.

Sure the story is as tedious as it is unskippable, but hey at least I had an excuse to walk away and stretch my legs for a bit. It does look like you're driving through an empty nightmare dreamscape, but it's 16 years old so I wasn't expecting to be blown away by the visuals anyway. The wide roads, lack of traffic and forgiving Need for Speed handling can often lead to other drivers disappearing in the rear view mirror, but I lost enough races to be well aware that failure could be one bad crash away. And I've played enough arcade racers like Ferrari 355 Challenge and Sega Rally to know that I have more fun actually making progress in a racing game than not. Metropolis Street Racer is my enemy.

Need for Speed: Undercover shows that even the weakest Black Box Need for Speed games can still be fun. Plus it's got Ghosts by Ladytron on the soundtrack, so it gets a thumbs up from me.

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Thanks for reading! If you've got opinions about Need for Speed: Undercover, then it's your lucky day as you can type them all into that comment box down there.

You can also take a guess at what the next game will be. Even though you already know what it is. (It's the racing game with the hot air balloons in it.)