EA's Need for Speed franchise has been in a bit of a bland position over the last couple years. While the games often worked to try and mix around with the formula from year to year a fair bit, the release of EA's own "Burnout Paradise" posed a bit of an odd surprise for the publisher. With Burnout switching to an open world setting, it meant that the game competed directly with Need for Speed in that space. Last year's Need for Speed Pro Street was a diversion for the series from recent years, going to track-based racing, plenty of tuning options for vehicles and focusing entirely on the events, rather than exploring the city or free-roam running from the cops. The game had a much more linear structure to it than its predecessors.

ProStreet didn't turn out too well, so Black Box (the game's developers) went back to the drawing board and returned to an open world non-linear, free roam setting - with this year's Need for Speed Undercover, but that wasn't the only design change. Undercover also seems to be directed right at the casual market, both in terms of presentation and its extremely relaxed learning curve.

The end result, however, in my opinion, is a game that has almost no redeeming qualities. It falls short on almost every front, and is a major step backwards not only for the franchise, but racing games in general. With Burnout Paradise having been out for a long time (and supported incredibly well by other developers and publishers such as Criterion) and Midnight Club: Los Angeles having just hit stores recently, the competition is very strong, leaving no reason whatsoever to choose Undercover over either of the aforementioned titles.

The major reason for its total failure is the game's complete and utter misuse of its open world environment. The whole point in having an open environment is to allow gamers to explore their world, find new challenges, perhaps some hidden locations and generally hunt down people to race. That doesn't happen one bit in Undercover. You cannot even drive to an event to start it or enter your garage. To begin an event, you can either head to the overhead map, which requires a couple of seconds of loading despite its utter simplicity. This will load up whatever your nearest event is, or in some cases, the next major event you're due to take part in.

All of this means that unless you're running from the cops, there's absolutely no reason to drive around the city when not in an event. It's pointless. You can't come across any hidden events, new racers or anything of this sort. Unless just feel like testing out your ride or just feel like exploring for no good reason, there's no reason to drive around on your own.

This brings me to my next issue - the game is incredibly easy. It was almost a certainty that i'd win events by a good 20 seconds or so, and I'd have the worst car in the field. In fact, i've been able to smoke a lineup of Lamborghinis and Corvettes with an Audi TT, and that should never happen. If your car's ratings are half of what your competition has, you can probably win with ease. Imagine what it'd be like if I was driving a Lamborghini!

While the gameplay is a failure, the graphics don't help to bring the game back into my good books either. The game is very bland looking, with only reasonably detailed cars, that stand no chance against today's other racing titles with much more details vehicles, and a city that almost entirely lacks a sense of life and oomph, like every real city has. There are no pedestrians at all, there's very little traffic on the roads, and in general there's very little to convince you that people actually live and breathe there.

The framerate on the Xbox 360 stays somewhat consistent, and is acceptable... just. It isn't nearly as smooth as it should be. Putting the framerates attained in Undercover side by side with Burnout or the latest Midnight Club simply makes it look like a joke and a resource hog. Burnout runs at a constant 60fps, while Midnight Club features a city bustling with life (and still manages to obtain and maintain better framerates than Undercover).

The online component is impressive, but very simple. There are three modes, which are practicaly only two - Cops and Robbers, circuits races and dashes. The latter two are straight-up races, one of which has multiple laps and the other just having a different position for the Start and Finish lines, so there's two lines instead of one. Wow, big change for the new mode there. Cops and Robbers is essentially a variant of one flag Capture the Flag, where the robbers are trying to deliver their goods to their hideout while the cops are trying to catch them (which resets the goods). All of these work reasonably well and can be fun, but there's not much variety in the modes, as you should be able to tell.