Need for Speed: Undercover (Wii)

Before I start pointing out the good and the bad, I would just like to say that I only had this game for a week and in that time made it 57% of the way through the story mode. Besides the story mode, it also has a challenge mode which I will cover later in the review.


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GENERAL:
NFS: undercover for the Wii has a couple of control schemes which can be used. The best of which (in my opinion) is simply the ...
...is done by rotating the Wii-mote left and right to steer, with the 2 button being the accelerator, the 1 button being reverse, and the B button being the handbrake.


The other control schemes besides the Wii-wheel and Wii-mote are the Nunchuk, the classic controller, or the Game Cube controller. The classic controller and Game Cube controller basically working like controllers do with most racing games, with the A button being ... more

Before I start pointing out the good and the bad, I would just like to say that I only had this game for a week and in that time made it 57% of the way through the story mode. Besides the story mode, it also has a challenge mode which I will cover later in the review.

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GENERAL:
NFS: undercover for the Wii has a couple of control schemes which can be used. The best of which (in my opinion) is simply the Wii-mote, unless of course you have the Wii-Wheel. The steering is done by rotating the Wii-mote left and right to steer, with the 2 button being the accelerator, the 1 button being reverse, and the B button being the handbrake.

The other control schemes besides the Wii-wheel and Wii-mote are the Nunchuk, the classic controller, or the Game Cube controller. The classic controller and Game Cube controller basically working like controllers do with most racing games, with the A button being accelerate, control stick for steering etc.

There is also a large range of cars to choose from, the total being somewhere between 60 and 70. Plus, in story mode, these cars are all fully customisable, from the height of the car all the way down to what the exhaust looks like.

On the subject of cars, however, the NPC vehicles in the game have a slight graphical problem. This is, of course, visibility, which matters rather a lot in a driving/racing game, wouldn't you say? The issue here, is that the cars don't seem to appear until you are fairly near to them. And I don't mean about a 1/2 mile away, I mean more like a couple of hundred feet.

This is fine when you're sticking around 80 mph, maybe 100, but when you're driving down the motorways at speeds of around 200 mph, you don't get enough time to react and will tend to smash your way through the vehicles instead of swerving around them, losing considerable speed as you do so.

While we're on the subject of graphics, the game overall doesn't look too bad. The cars look OK, as well as most of the scenery and everything else. In my opinion, I'd say the only places where the graphics themselves let you down is when the helicopters are chasing you. True, you don't often see them, just their shadows, however, when you do see them, the helicopters are visually appalling, and look like they've been made for a a console with graphical capabilities similar to the Play station One.
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STORY MODE:
The two main differences between story mode and challenge mode, is that in story mode the cars are all fully customisable, and you also get the free roam feature. Providing you've played any of the NFS games before this one, you should know what a free roaming game is. For those who don't know, however, I'll elaborate.

A free roaming game is different from most platformers, racing games, and pretty much all other types of game. A free roaming game basically means that instead of having a fixed path to follow you will get a whole world to go wherever you want and explore. The downside with this game, then, is that, yes, there IS a free roaming feature in it, but when you are taking part in races the free-roaming feature is suddenly gone, leaving you with pre-defined routes, instead of letting you make your own routes to the destination.

This is fine at first, but when you've been playing the game a bit, you will find yourself knowing some great short cuts, but not being able to take them due to the pre-defined route for you to follow.

Now, i earlier mentioned about the mostly OK, sometimes poor graphics you find yourself faced with. Luckily, in story mode, the cut-scenes are instead live action sequences, leaving you with no more of those random arm-through-a-wall graphical hiccups to worry about. For those of you not entirely sure on just what live action sequences are, it is basically just clips of video (people acting it out) as opposed to CGI graphics. The only exception to this is when you get busted in which case it will be animated, but these only last a few seconds, and aren't really all that important unless you like to see little animated people knocking each other out and throwing people into cop-cars.

On a similar topic, the animation is good, except for the destruction sequences, the most noticeable one being when you knock down a monument, it appears to float and rotate before crashing into the ground.

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CHALLENGE MODE:
There isn't that much to say about challenge mode, so I'll just describe what it is.
Challenge mode is different from story mode in that: you get given the cars to race with instead of choosing/making your own, instead of free-roaming you get a menu of races and criminal events to compete in, similar to a tournament as you unlock the next tier for every event won, with each tier being a bit harder than the last.  

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