Need for Speed Underground 2 Review

Tuned engines, nitro systems, burned tires and a great palette of colors & paints… you know what I am talking about right? Well… I am talking about those hot events (fairly illegal) that take place in many countries all around the globe: the street races. If driving such a car was, or is, what you always dreamt of, you can do so now. You will be able to drive a tuned Toyota Supra, Mazda RX-7, Audi TT and many others whenever you want. Let’s see if this game deserves a special place in our games collection.

When I first took Need for Speed Underground 2 I was very curious to see how this new game looks. Driving games aren’t my type but I play with joy any good game on the market. So I inserted the cds and installed the game. After some minutes a nice music with rock influences was bouncing on my room walls. A well done intro puts you into the street races atmosphere and makes your blood start boiling. A “chick” appears and tells you some safety rules. She will appear during career mode all along your road to celebrity.

The game comes with a career mode, quick race, online play and LAN game. The new idea that guys from EA came up with is how the races will take place. You won’t just pick them from a text menu table as you were used until now. This time you have a whole town to drive through (I think they saw the success GTA had and they thought “hey nice idea… we should use it too”) and pick races. There are 6 type of races: circuit (you will drive along with your opponents around a track for several laps), sprint (a long track that you must finish first in order to win), drag (you will drive in straight line making sure you change the transmission at time in order to be the first that crosses the finish line), drift (make the best & longest drifts with your car and beat the opponents high score), street x (races that take place on drift tracks) and finally the Underground Racing League – URL races (sets of races that will make you earn new cars at the Car Lot shop and get you more money).

You will start the game as a simple guy. You come into a town and a girl (the one from the intro) calls and tells you she will give you a car and become your manager stating that she knows how the things roll in the town. The races appear on your map as small colored circles (for example the drift races are represented with yellow circles, the circuit races with violet circles etc). In order to pick a race you will have to run into its circle and press a specific button on your keyboard. During the race you will be able to restart it at any time you want, or leave it and exit to the main town map. Mostly all of the races you win will bring you money and celebrity points. You can spend the money in specific shops to make your car run better by upgrading its components, paint it for a better look and add different things on and inside it.

The shops will also appear on the town map as filled circles of different colors. In order for them to appear you must cruise the town and find them first. No worries about finding them, just drive though the map and look out for the lights (red, blue, green, yellow). Let’s talk about all the shops and see how they can help you during your time spent into the NFSU 2 city. The performance shop will upgrade your components in order to increase your acceleration, top speed and car handling. You can buy engine, suspension, tires upgrades and many more I don’t want to reveal in order not to spoil your surprise. But a good car is not enough in street races. You need a cool car also. Oh, but I am wrong. I said cool ? I wanted to say an awesome car! And you can do it with the 3 shops : body shop, car specialties shop and graphics shop. Walk into the graphics shop and paint your car, put vinyls and decals onto it. Enter the car specialties shop and add neons, lights, audio components, spinners and other cool things to your car. The last but not least shop is the body shop. You can change the entire components in here like front & rear bumpers, spoilers, roof scoops, rims etc. These will help your car's “star rating” rise. When you achieve a certain rating different firms will ask for you to appear on their magazines or DVD covers. Every time you appear on one of these you will be given some money. From time to time sponsors will look out for you. When you sign a contract with a sponsor you will have to do some specific races, appear on a number of DVD covers and finish a fixed number of typical races.

A thing I didn’t like in this game was the damage system. Or better said the fact that this doesn’t exist. You can crash in walls, cars or any other objects in the game without even scratching your car. I usually like to drive next to an opponent and when I see an opportunity to rush him into a wall or another car to damage or even take him out of the race I do it. Well with the absence of the damage system I cannot do this anymore in NFSU 2. So the “bad” guys like me won’t be able to crash anything in this game. Maybe next time folks.

EA did sounds & graphics pretty good. You will be able to hear different tuned levels of the engines, sounds of the wheels when you hit the brakes etc. The usual. Known artists have signed the soundtrack of this game and here I mean names like Snoop Dog ft The Doors (Riders of the storm), Paul Van Dyk (Nothing But You), Terror Squad (Lean Back) and many more. Sometimes I opened the game and played it just to listen to the music. Regarding the graphics; the cars are sharp and the city looks pretty good both in the sun or in the cold rain. To be able to play the game with all the full graphic options you will need a good system (I played it with my AMD Athlon 2500+, 512 RAM and a GForce FX 5200 128 bytes and with the full video options the game moved in low frames).