I don’t usually tend to play EA’s collection of mainstream gaming spectacles. But this was an exception. At first I was introduced to the series back in 1997 with Need for Speed II when it was a lot simpler. It was more of a racing game however and less focused on the ‘modding’ aspect.

The game at hand though was released back in 2004 and built on the success of the re imagining of the franchise the previous year. Putting the obvious connections with the Tony Hawks games renaming aside. The game is actually quite fun. It’s based around the story of a man who is on the run or something.. Well, the story isn’t actually very important and its not the reason your actually playing this game. Your mission in the game is to basically drive around a big city and immerse yourself in the underground racing scene of ‘Bayview’. The game starts out slowly as you are stuck with only being able to afford the slowest cars and must win races to be able to afford newer cars. As you progress through the game there really isn’t much of a difficulty curve. The only difficult part is trying to balance the ‘bank’ to finance the upgrade of your cars parts as well as the appearance, as both are important to progress through the game.

What I found most interesting about the game, was the huge amount of customization of your cars. You can change almost everything about the cars, the bonnets, wheels, roof scoops, side skirts, exhaust pipes etc. As well as being able to paint and vinyl pretty much every part of your car. Although you can tell its age, the feature allows your creative side to take over as you can customize to your hearts content outside of career mode, making the most ‘tricked out rides’ yet. Its just a shame the PS2 online network never took off over here, it’d be great to have seen everyone else’s pimped out ridges.

There are many different types of entertaining races in this game that primarily fill the bulk of the career mode. You’ve got your run-of-the-mill normal racing round laps type. Then you have a drift mode where the object is to achieve the most points by drifting around corners before reaching the end of the circuit. Drag mode is sort of like drag racing where you have to gear-up at the best time, you can gain speed via drafting to overtake your opponents, its quite easy to get past your opponents with the added ‘Nitrous Oxide’ boosts as well. Apart from these two though there really isn’t anything too innovative racing wise.

The graphics in the game are still pretty impressive and actually look better than some of the most recent games I’ve played. The creators have gone for a stylized approach rather than a realistic one as the game is purely set at night. There are also some great camera effects as well as vibrant lighting used in most parts of the city as well as the tracks you race on. The music is also quite stylized.

EA have gone to a lot of effort with their real music soundtrack, but for the most part, it just fails to fit in. The music is okay until you hit the race track and are forced to listen to the most crappy guitar music I’ve ever heard. I wish they could have implemented some form of custom soundtrack a la Xbox style. The soundtrack just does not fit in well with the atmosphere of the game and fails to capture the whole grassroots underground feel they are trying to give it – it just comes off way too glossy and, slightly tacky. This isn’t helped by the mass amount of advertising forced into the game either. At first I didn’t think it was that bad, until I realized the sponsors included from totaly unrelated companies. These include but are not limited to Cingular, the phone company, who sponsor pretty much the whole UI of the game. As well as Burger King, whose bill boards are located throughout the city. In my opinion, the problem isn’t the advertising itself, there is just not enough of it. The way I see it, if your thinking of including advertising in a game, you either don’t have any or you need lots to add to the realism. It just feels tremendously odd with only a few advertisements on the streets when in real life, there would be at least 10-15 on one street.

I can’t say Need for Speed Underground 2 is the greatest racing game ever. But it certainly is a great game. I also can’t say that the games racing is anything new, but the level of customisation you can make to the cars is pure genius and has obviously influenced many games since this game was released. If your in the mood for a decent fun game, I suggest you pick this up as it is pretty damn cheap now and is an excellent pick up and play title.

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