The graphics look good enough, but the city lacks any vibrancy or flavour as you would expect from any metropolis. This takes the emphasis away from the open free-roaming world and makes it relatively pointless, as it is far simpler to simply jump to the races.Īlthough you won’t miss much by doing this, as the world that EA have created is relatively dull in light of what other similar titles recently have produced. Once having successfully made the escape the city is opened to you, and it is a massive world.Īll the more unfortunate then, that as the game is explained to you in the early stages you are shown that by pressing down on the D-Pad you can automatically jump into the closest race, or by pressing "up" get onto the GPS and again jump instantly to a race of your choosing. The game starts out with you running from the police (which is something you will be doing often, as you are after all undercover). Many of them do seem a little too short, providing often only titbits of story between the racing, but they do make you feel inclusive. The story is presented to you in a number of live action cutscenes and this gives the game a gritty feel and seem of reasonably high quality, although the acting is hardly Oscar material. You play an undercover cop who is attempting to infiltrate an illegal car smuggling syndicate. The game starts out in a fictional metropolis called Tri-City. Has the ultimate Need for Speed finally arrived in the next gen with this latest iteration? Unfortunately, since the success of Underground, the shift to next gen consoles has been somewhat less stellar. Need for Speed even set the bar back in the day, including an open world and diverse body customisation in Need for Speed: Underground. Since 1994 to be precise, with more iterations than you can shake a stick at.Ī total of eleven Need for Speed’s have now come and gone, and it is with fondness that we think back to the early days of the series, when it became one of the top arcade racing titles available. Need for Speed has been around for a long time.