0 Need For Speed: Undercover

I’m all for a sense of style. A slick look can grant a ho-hum game an eye-catching sheen. But with videogame-and any sort of software, really – style absolutely must take a back seat to functionality. Which brings us to Need for Speed: Undercover. Slickly designed and frankly gorgeous in sports, Undercover positively oozes style, from its beautiful car models and nifty speed effects to its rich lightning and oversaturated colors. It even has a sexy pause menu. Really!

There’s just one problem; all this style and graphical richness hits the game’s performance. Scenes with a lot of action can suffer from slowdown. You encounter occasional stutter even racing solo down a fairly low-key straightaway. In a game centered around shooting super-powered sports cars through dense city streets, those little hiccups do serious damage – when you’re trying to dodge through heavy traffic, even a tiny pause can completely blow your sense of timing.

I wish that weren’t the case, because aside from performance, Undercover is a solid racer. The enormous city offers loads of different driving environments, with a variety of race events easily accessible through the GPS map (Burnout Paradise lesson learned: no need to manually drive to each one). The experience based progression system adds a nice sense of accomplishment, and you even get points and cash just for driving around between events.

Some interesting events types offer diversion from the standard street racing. Highway battles, for example, require you to dodge traffic, as you try to pull ahead of an opponent by a certain distance; while outrun events throw away the route markers, asking you only to stay in the lead, on whatever route you choose, for a certain period of time. Unfortunately, these events aren’t accessible in the slick, well-integrated online mode.

Online does feature the objective-based game Cops ‘n’ Robbers, where a team of police from ferrying cash from one location to another. But aside from that, it’d strictly pint-to-point and circuit races. No one’s going to deny that Undercover is one fine looking creature. And it certainly offers enough depth and variety to keep racing fans competent game – but persistent performance issues prevent it from being anything more than that.