Need for Speed: Underground Review

The Need for Speed series has existed for decades, and everyone seems to have their personal favorites. I have enjoyed how many different types of racing games have been developed in this series. They never seem to make quite the same game more than a couple of times. This can be a good thing at times. It can also be annoying when they make a great title that receives universal praise only to move on from it within a few years. That’s what happened with Need for Speed: Underground. This game and its only sequel were released around the height of the Fast and the Furious series, when everyone seemed to be into tuners. It brought nighttime street racing to the forefront and gave me some of my fondest memories of the PS2 era.

Introduction

Need for Speed: Underground ditches much of what we had come to expect from the Need for Speed series previously. The series had been long known for mostly road racing and police chases, and you won’t find any of that here. Instead, players are thrown into the fictional Olympic City in the import/tuner scene.

Story

This is the first game in the series to feature a career mode with an actual storyline, even if it’s not much of one. You’re just trying to get to the top of the rankings for each race type to challenge the top racer, Eddie, the leader of the Eastsiders. The story begins with your player daydreaming before your friend Samantha wakes you up and shows you the ropes. You then meet a mechanic, TJ, who will give you unique upgrades for completing time trials. The story continues with the villain (Eddie) trying to keep the player character down by pitting them against their friend (Samantha). That’s all I’ll say as I don’t want to spoil the whole story, but it’s pretty basic.

Racing Experience

Gameplay

I was pleasantly surprised by how great the racing felt in Need for Speed: Underground. This is a straight-forward arcade racer. The handling feels nice and floaty, lending to the game’s affinity for drifting. The game has some rubber-banding, but I thought it was fair for most races, even on hard difficulty. The CPU cars can be aggressive if you tap them. Some will even shadow your every movement if you piss them off. It’s common for CPU cars to smash into traffic randomly, which can help or hurt you, depending on how close you are. The traffic seems to be in the worst spots and can border on unfair when you’re landing a jump, and they end up right in front of you.

There is a star reputation system that takes into account everything that you do. This will unlock new content for you, or tournaments and races to compete in. It looks at margins of victory, drifts, near misses, nitrous, and visual upgrades. I don’t recall many games using this type of system outside the Underground games, and I like its uniqueness. It’s fun to have a reason to make your car look cool and try to do every little thing in a race well to earn more points.

Race Types

There are six types of races in Need for Speed: Underground. Sprint and Circuit races are what you would see in practically any racing game with a point-to-point or set number of laps. There’s also a Lap Knockout, in which the last-place player is eliminated after each lap. The only other basic race type is free run, in which you can learn a route without having any rival racers. There are even tournaments where you have to have the most points after a few races. These act as a bit of a cut-off point between sets of races.

The two types that I enjoyed the most were Drift and Drag. Drifting was a pretty new concept in video games at the time, and I thought that NFS introduced it beautifully. Points are awarded for speed and slide. Your multiplier increases the longer you can chain it, up to X5. The only issue I had is that it is nearly impossible on hard. The totals you’re required to reach are far beyond what I could manage.

Darg races were my absolute favorite. You have to shift at the perfect time, including right off the start, which involves holding the button just enough to hit that perfect shift. Not only do you have to manage that, but you also have to watch out for traffic, obstacles like trains and jumps, and even rivals. It requires a lot of patience and a bit of luck, making it so much fun to try and pass that finish line in first place.

Presentation

Graphics

Need for Speed: Underground is easily one of the most impressive-looking racers on that generation of consoles. Olympic City pops with vibrant lighting and signs for brands like RadioShack and AutoZone in the background. Cars zoom through the city, with neon gleaming underneath and city lights reflecting off windshields. There’s even a special blurring effect when you activate your nitrous that accentuates the element of speed.

The one complaint I have about Underground is that there could have been more variation in the environments you see in the game. It’s hard to feel like you’re getting anywhere because most races have similar scenery and routes. It looks beautiful, but once you’ve run past the bowling alley for the 20th time, it starts to lose its luster. This becomes more apparent as you get along and play variations of the same tracks. It’s not the end of the world, but it makes it monotonous.

Sound

It would be a huge disservice not to mention the soundtrack of this game. This was in the heyday of the EA Trax initiative, where it seemed like every EA game had a fantastic soundtrack. It was no different here, with this likely being the first place many people heard the iconic track “Get Low” from Lil’ Jon and the Eastside Boys. The track list features other notable artists like Rob Zombie, Petey Pablo (who created a song just for the game), T.I., and Rancid, to name a few. There are a few songs for everyone in there, and I felt that they matched the game’s tone quite well.

The sound effects are equally impressive. EA miked up real cars to get their library of unique sounds. The crunching metal of every crash feels authentic when you make a mistake and smash into some traffic. Tires screench off the starting line as you try to get the edge on the other cars. The ambient noise is as good as any racing game I’ve played, as you can hear other racers using their nitrous to try and pass you or listen to them scraping the wall on a tight turn. The sound design is very well done.

Customization

The career mode is very much tied to customization. The idea isn’t to have a garage full of cool cars like in many racing games. Instead, the goal is to customize one car and make it the best and coolest. Unfortunately, Need for Speed Underground lacks some customization on the performance side. You unlock three levels of engines, turbo, nitrous, brakes, etc. There is no tuning involved, which was a disappointment to many, including me. That would have put it over the top, but instead, you unlock different performance options as you complete races.

Where Underground does shine is visual customization. I started with a Mazda Miata that didn’t have much going for it. After a few hours of playing through various races, I could customize different parts of my car’s body, add vinyl and decals, and pick a neon color for under the vehicle. The cool thing is that it doesn’t just give you everything immediately. There are three tiers and certain parts until you’ve completed specific races. I had to wait to customize things like headlights, roof scoops, and exhaust tips until I was pretty far into the game.

Multiplayer

Split-Screen

The game is only two-player split-screen on all platforms. It allows you to race in Drag and Drift events, which is a nice inclusion. Unfortunately, you can only use cars from the main profile, so your friend can’t bring over their custom ride.

Online

The online modes offer four-player support for race, drift, and drag. You can view other players’ cars before racing them. EA even had a matchmaking tool that could predict your chances of winning. Traffic isn’t available online, so it’s a lot easier to have a competitive racing experience. There were special magazine covers you could only earn online. The cool part is that you’ll still earn style points online to unlock items for your ride. You can still play this game online if you can find a game via PS2online.com. I’m just not sure how fully featured it will be compared to the original servers, which have since been taken down.

Conclusion

Need for Speed: Underground is a game fondly remembered by many, and for good reason. It’s a fun racing game that doesn’t feel punishing if you need to retry a race a few times. The soundtrack is iconic, the setting looks beautiful, and it normalized drag and drift racing in games even if it may not have been the first to have either of those modes. The visual customization was second to none then, and it was so satisfying to see your car start from something barebones to being on magazine covers. I think there are some rose-tinted glasses here, too, because the game gets boring after the first 40 events before picking up near the end. The settings of each race feel so similar to one another, which doesn’t help either. Still, Underground was fun to run through again, and it was a game that helped shape future racing games for better or worse over the next decade.