Another year goes by and another annually released EA franchise hits the stores. This time it's the sequel to last year's big Christmas selling number 1 game, Need for Speed Underground.

the first game made a drastic change to the Need for Speed series. EA decided to take it in the direction of the import tuner section. Gone were the circuit based town racing with Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches, and in came the Mitsubishis, Fords and Toyotas. The sequel stays true to this. The game now includes more than thirty cars, an insane amount of customization and a giant city that spans 125 miles of open road.

 

EA have made one drastic change to the sequel however. The game no longer has you going through racers in a menu, instead EA have opted to give you one large city to drive through at your pleasure. Everything is done through this city. It's full of garages, paint shops, car shops and rival racers to race against.

The story kicks off (Yes it does have a story, although a weak one), with the racer arriving at Bayview airport. He's moved to Bayview because he was getting ambushed from rival racing gangs in his last town. The entire games story is done in a comic book style presentation, this does look pretty good but in honesty it really doesn't do anything to the game. They just get in the way when you're anxious to just get on with the race.

Once you start, you are given a basic car and a section of the city to drive around. This is where the open-ended city comes in. You'll find yourself searching out racers and shops, most of which appear on the map with a fair few hidden and soused out via clues through the radio and text message icons you find around the city. While you progress further through the game, more areas of the city open up to you. This is where the problem comes in. In theory an open-ended city sounds fantastic, and it could have been if EA had just fixed some problems. Once the whole city is available to you, you start to feel that getting from point A to B is a bore and draws from the enjoyment of the game. It starts to become a chore when are you having to travel from the bottom of the map right up to top just for one race. EA could have added some sort of option to take you to the start of the section of the city you unlocked, that way you wouldn't find yourself having these chores to do. On the plus side the town isn't easy to get lost in using your GPS system which gives you an arrow on your display which points at what roads to take to get to your destination.

 

EA have added some extra racing modes this year. There is the inclusion of Outrun, which is similar to something seen in Tokyo Xtreme Racer. You challenge a random racer who is driving around and you flash your lights at him, you then start a race where the objective is to get 1000 metres in front of your opponent. There's also a new type of drift section called Downhill Drift. This is where you are placed on top of the city's mountain and have to drift all the way down with style. The last new addition is Street X, a collection of really short and tight hairpin tracks which are very technical and hardly rely on speed but more cornering ability. The returnees are Drag, Drift, Circuit, Sprint and Tournament.

The car handling is still arcade like, although more heavily than the last game and the sense of speed is decent, it does feel maybe a bit slower than last year's game. There's no longer use of speed blur motion as much as its prequel did, and cube owners hoping for something as fast as Burnout, bad news, you won't find that fix here. The game also has no car damage, instead when you crash, you get a slow motion replay of your car flipping and turning, then mostly landing back on its wheels. After a few watches it gets in the way, but you can turn it off in the options, so it's not really a problem.

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The thing that made the prequel shine out last year was the customization, and again this is one of the games strong points. There isn't another game, especially for the GameCube, which includes so much car customization. The game includes all of the upgrades from the last game and more. There is so much visual styling to be seen on your cars. The physical upgrades are more customizable as well. Once you've installed your new equipment, you can take it to a Test Track/Dyno Room and customization the way your engine/gearbox/turbo works. It does add a lot more detail than just sticking them in. This is where another little gameplay upgrade comes into play. Once you managed to get hold of the NOS you'll find yourself receiving more NOS for doing power slides, good overtaking etc. This is something that is ripped right out of Burnout, along with the boost metre, the more you do good driving, the more NOS you'll get.

Which comes to another part of the game; the multiplayer. First and foremost there is no online mode in the GameCube version. We have become grown to ports of games on the system without online play, which is a huge shame. I managed to have a crack on the Xbox version online, just to see what Cube owners were missing. It was actually a lot of fun and it does have ranking boards and tournaments to race in. The best thing is though that everyone looks different because of so much customization, no one ever looks to the same making identifying your friends and foes easy. However, the cube game does have multiplayer. You can take part in all of the different racing modes available, but with only two players, it surely doesn't match up to the 6 players of Xbox live.

 

Another spotlight for last year's game was the graphics. They really looked nice and somewhat shiny. The same can be said for the sequel. Although the shine factor is only used for when it rains (a more realistic reason I guess). It does seem that the frame rate in this version seems to suffer a lot more than the prequel; you'll find yourself getting random cases of slowdown while racing. It can take away the sense of speed while you're playing; it still does look good though. The car models are nice and the city looks beautiful, if somewhat stale; no one seems to like walking out at night time.

The sound effects are good enough to sell you. Each time you upgrade your car, you'll hear a newer meaner engine sound coming out of your car, and they all sound decent enough. Also, while driving around the sound effects give a sense of wind passing past as if, a nice touch adding to the sense of speed. The dialogue in cut scenes is your bog standard laughable mediocre dubbings however. They all speak in some kind of radical language which just gets on your nerves after a while. If everyone talked like that in real life, I wouldn't be surprised if they all got slaps around the face. "Get the point dawg?" I don't… really…! The soundtrack is a mixture of rap, rock, trance, and dance. There's probably something there for everyone, although because of this, the soundtrack will probably end up been reduced to you just listening to five or six songs, instead of all twenty-seven.

 

While playing the game I did notice the AI seemed to be somewhat random. One point I was at the starting line revving down my motor like some hot kid then bang, just as I set off, the car next to me turned and gave me a good ramming into the barrier. Other times it just seems to be normal, and then the next moment hyper killing aggressiveness with a vengeance kicks in again.

NFSU2 is a decent, fun if somewhat flawed racer. It has what made the original a fun game, a deeper customization section, more of everything, but then, as they say, too much of a good thing can spoil the enjoyment. I think EA might have been a tad too adventurous with the large open city. It was a good idea, and I think for the next game, if reworked could turn out to be great. In this game it's far too stale, nothing goes on in it at all. They need to make it exciting when you are traveling to places, either that or cut the travel distance down.

If you are after a racer this year, then by all means give it a rent and see if you enjoy what it has to offer, if not, then you can always wait and see what next years sequel has for you.