Need For Speed Underground 2 Review

One thing I really liked this time around was that you can test your car and then adjust it for each type of race. That means that, for example, if you need more acceleration in one type of race than another like in Street X for example, then you can adjust your car for it and then save it and each and every time you’ll enter a Street X race it’ll load automatically. That means you can do the tuning once and then use it fort he rest of the game. This is one of the best things I’ve seen in a racing game yet and it’s easy to do and it works really well.

As you probably already know you get a variety of licensed cars from various manufacturers from Mitsubishi to Honda as well as lots of others, but what I found funny was that they added SUVs this year and other types of cars which don’t really have their place in this game. I mean, it can be really funny to tune a Hummer 2, but it doesn’t race really well and it controls really badly. I don’t know what was the reasoning behind this, but I would have preffered more cool cars than this. Maybe some people like it, I don’t know, but for me it was completely pointless.

Last year’s game looked great, and the sequel also looks good adding more effects, bigger environments, more particle effects and better lighting as well as coll reflections on the cars and different times of the day. When you brake or do spins there is lots of smoke coming out from behind your car and I thought it looked great, and the speed efefct when you use your nitro is still there and it looks amazing, making everything stretch and blur a little to make you feel like you are going at amazing speeds. The car models are well detailed compared to other GameCube racers and the textures in the game were nice, but some were still a little blurry from up close but since you are racing all of the time you won’t really notice it. Overall, it looks really great except for one thing: the framerate sucks! It doesn’t make the game unplayable, and those who are not game fanatics probably won’t care, but when you are racing at high speeds you really need a good framerate as it helps to really make you feel like you are there racing at over 150 miles per hour. Instead, the framerate will drop from time to time and it really gets frustrating. I think that if last year’s version was ok then tere’s no reason why EA couldn’t have made this game run at a smooth framerate, especially since other games on the cube look better and have a more stable framerate.

Sound is not disapointing though as, like last year, everything sounds really great in DPL2. If you have a good sound system then you should really be impressed with this game. The sounds of the cars are amazing and the more you tune them and buy new upgrades the sounds change and it really makes for a movie-like experience except it’s all happening in real time. Like I had said in my review for Need For Speed Underground, it really feels like watching the fast and the furious. I think they’ve done an amazing job yet again and it is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game. The music is kind of cool, but I’m not really into rap and hip hop music, but I think there is a little something for everyone. You can also customize the tracklist so that you only listen to tracks you like.

So I thing that if you liked last year’s version and don’t really mind the unstable framerate then you will be fine with this one. If offers a lot of replay value and even more of what made the last game so great, while fixing every probelm it had to make everything as perfect as possible. The multiplayer is good but since the framerate is so bad it can become frustrating but at least it’s there. Still, I was really happy with this one and I think EA has set a new standard for arcade racers.