Reviewed: April 14, 2005
Reviewed by: Mark Smith
Publisher
Electronic Arts
Developer
EA Canada
Released: March 18, 2005
Genre: Racing
Players: 1-4
ESRB: Everyone
7
7
8
8
7.8
Supported Features
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Without a doubt, one of my favorite racing games of this past holiday season had to be Need for Speed Underground 2 and when I heard EA was bringing this game to the PSP I must admit I was a bit skeptical that they could capture the “tuner” scene as well as they had on the big systems. After all, NFSUG2 delivered a huge living city with nearly a hundred hours of gameplay and nearly infinite possibilities when it came to collecting and customizing the cars.
Need for Speed Underground Rivals is a valiant attempt to bring as much of the console original as will fit on the UMD and make it as playable as possible on a 5” screen with some quirky analog input. For the most part EA succeeds, at least in atmosphere, including some great nighttime driving visuals and enough hip-hop beats to warrant a dedicated Music Player complete with visualization.
Admittedly, the game is on a much smaller scale than its console cousin. There are only 20 cars and ten circuit tracks so things might seem a bit more constrictive. But there are eight racing modes including drift attack and rally relay and a garage full of custom parts and visual upgrades to stylize your ride before you show it off in online and Wi-Fi matches.
Rivals is organized much differently than NFSUG2. There is no free roam city driving and no story to worry about. From the main menu you pick either Quick Play or Circuit Race, the latter offering four tiers of events including Circuit, Lap Knockout, Rally Relay, and Car Spec events where you drive a specific car.
Normally, in games like these you would head straight for the circuit mode and never look back, but the Quick Play mode in Rivals delivers some surprising original content of its own including Drift Attack (drift around pillars for big points), Drag (tweak your car and test your manual shifting skills), Street Cross (tight twisting tracks), and Nitrous Run (nitro refills at each checkpoint). All four modes are incredibly addictive and very challenging.
Most of the races offer bronze, silver, and gold medals, so you’ll have an incentive to go back and re-race many of the events to earn maximum points and unlock all sorts of gear back at the garage. You’ll have to be continually upgrading your car to meet the challenge of the AI that increases with each medal upgrade.
Visiting the garage is an interesting adventure. You can purchase new parts and see how they affect your performance before installing them. Visual upgrades are free but they must be unlocked by performing well in other events. Then it’s just a matter of sticking on the bumper, rims, or vinyl design of your choice.
There is a whole lot of racing and with only ten tracks the levels will quickly start to repeat but the game does a good job of mirroring or reversing the tracks, sometimes both, so it can take over a week of solid gameplay before you can memorize every last turn.
The A.I. is challenging but cheap in that the game artificially keeps things close to maintain a false level of excitement. Sure, pulling away from the pack and nearly lapping the last place car might be boring, but if I have dumped a few hundred thousand into my car I should have that privilege. Instead, no matter how good my car and how bad the cars I’m racing; everyone is always close. This is nice when I wreck on lap one or two since I can easily catch up, but if I wreck on lap four after having lead the entire race, I’ll be lucky to place let alone win.
Track design is very cool with plenty of shortcuts, obvious and hidden. The A.I. doesn’t seem to take the shortcuts until you have revealed them, so if you save them for the final lap you generally have an edge on the competition.
My biggest problem with Rivals is the actual gameplay. The framerate ranges from good to average but compared to the slick motion of Ridge Racer and Wipeout Pure, it just doesn’t compare. The game is still playable but the poor framerate combined with the twitch analog input and unusually large dead zone on the steering can have you weaving all over the road.
There were a few disturbing instance where the framerate chugged into single digits and two occasions (both in the shortcut through the underground parking garage) where the game totally locked up and I had to reboot my PSP. This is the only game in the entire PSP library that has locked up so far.
I’m getting pretty tired of all the night-driving games, especially with the gleaming wet surfaces of rain-slicked road in cities where it never actually rains. I guess it’s a great way to show off your graphical prowess but it’s been done to death. Impress me with something new, like DRY streets.
Even so, Rivals delivers a stunning cityscape, even though your view of it is restricted to predetermined tracks. I’d love to see a free-roaming cityscape like the console game, but I have a feeling that is beyond the memory capabilities of the PSP, at least without load screens every six blocks.
The car models are stunning with excellent paint, body parts, and custom vinyl designs. You can tint windows, and pimp your ride with countless visual upgrades. There is no car damage while driving but there is a great physics model that gives the cars a real weight about them and they will even send up showers of sparks when they bottom out.
Sound effects are merely adequate with various engine revs, skidding, and crash noises that are subdued by the overwhelming soundtrack, at least on the default audio mix. You can tweak the values if you would rather hear the cars, but I thought the music was better anyway. There is limited speech, basically a few words here and there to indicate race and lap status.
The music is a huge component in Rivals with more than 30 hot licensed tracks of various genres. As with most EA mixes, there is something for everybody which means most people will like about half of what is there, perhaps more if you are really into the urban and hip-hop scene. The EA Pocket TRAX Music Visualization Player is a great feature that allows you to program your favorite selections and listen to them much like any MP3 player.
Need for Speed Underground Rivals can be very challenging. It starts off easy enough earning those bronze medals but you will need to carefully budget your winnings and selectively upgrade your cars to win the better medals and earn more points to buy more upgrades to win more races…you get the idea.
Expect a good 30+ hours of racing action just to finish the stuff that can actually be finished. You can easily spend that much time again mastering the tracks, playing the other modes, and challenging friends to online or linked play. There is even a Party Play mode that allows four players to race each other using a single PSP.
The unreliable framerate, quirky controls and “rigged” A.I. certainly detract from what this game could have been, but I have to admit I did have a lot of fun. The tuning portion of the game isn’t all that intuitive and requires a basic knowledge of cars or at least experience with previous NFS titles.
If you play only one PSP racing game from the launch line-up make it Ridge Racer. If you can afford two, then by all means pick up Need for Speed Underground Rivals. It certainly offers a completely unique approach to handheld racing with a level of progressive customization that is unmatched by anything currently available in the handheld realm.