I bought this game last night and played about 5 hours of it,wow I was blown away.I've never had a (racing) gaming experience like that,just able to drive around and race people around many of the neiberhoods and freeways or enter any of the Underground races anytime.
PROS(there are no cons im not being generous just honest)
1.Graphics are sick (in a good way)
2.race whenever you want wherever you want
3.crazy amount of upgrades you can do whatever you
want to your vehicle,literally It will have Grand Turismo
fans drooling
4.cars handle well and the game is huge I told ya
earlier I played over 5 hrs. of the game well
I've only opened up or beaten 4 percent of the
game.It keeps track of all you stats.ALL OF THEM!
Bought this for my son, he loves it.
Uses it all the time.
No complaints from either of us.
When my sister decided to rent this game from Blockbuster last week, I thought that this game wasn't going to be anything special (since I am not a big fan of EA anyway). I wasn't really excited when she came home and popped the game into the Xbox (which disturbed me from my Halo 2 playing experience by the way), so I left that particular room and let her enjoy her rental for the night. After leaving it shelved for a couple of days and a losing streak in Halo 2's "Big Team Battle", I decided to give NFS:U2 a chance.
When I popped the disk into the Xbox, I decided to first enter the career mode that this game offered. What I first got was a taste of the speed that was to come (if I decided to press on) as I raced from the airport to a car lot. What I got when I got there was pretty much where the speed ended. When you first enter the car lot, you are stuck with a handful of low-end stock cars. Luckily, you get the first car for free (and several others for free as well when you get a sponsor).
When I chose my car and left to enter the streets of Bayview, I decided to cruise around the city for a bit (to get comfortable to where everything was, etc.). When I cruised around the city, besides the fact that my car stunk and there is a corporate logo on all the time I am in cruise mode (which I will get to later), driving wasn't that bad. The graphics were solid, there were a decent assortment of real-life stores and billboards (Burger King, Cingular, and Best Buy were the most noticeable, since they probably coughed up the most money to be in the game), and there was a good deal of pavement to drive on.
One minor irk I noticed in the beginning was that some of the areas that are raceable were barred off from me, therefore leaving me with a smaller space to cruise around in. Another irk that I noticed was that you have to find all of the Performance, Graphics, Specialty, and Detail shops by yourself to unlock all of the goodies that you can put in and on your car. And even then, a good deal of things are still locked away until you progress thorugh the game (who was the genius that thought this one up?).
In itself, the racing in the game is solid. As expected by me, NFS:U2 is an arcade racer which relies more on top speed and the overall performance of the car than the anticipation of a turn and working on your car setup to maximize race performance in certain situations (even though you can tweak you car on a test course). For an arcade racer, NFS:U2 holds it's own and executes its gameplay well.
As for the number of races that you can do, there is a good deal of depth in this game. The racing modes are: Circuit (A closed race which involves several laps... and the laps are pretty long), Sprint (follow a course to an end point), Drift (garner the most points while performing drifts), Drag (a race on a usually flat and straight piece of pavement), Street X (Race on a track with tight turns and short straightaways), Outrun (Race another AI driver to see who can get 1000 feet ahead of the other driver with some "bank" at stake, and U.R.L, which is the Underground Racing League (race on real tracks with different patterns). As you can see, a nice selection is at your fingertips.
The only problems with the in-game are that it seems to rain EVERY. SINGLE. RACE. The rain effects are nice (Kudos to the graphics department), but when it rains in every Circuit, U.R.L., and Sprint race, it gets aggrevating after a while. Thanks to this, I tend to think that Bayview is no more than a fictitious Seattle.
Another problem with the racing is that the racing seems a bit too "arcadey" at times. It is "arcadey" in the sense that there is an obvious catchup in the game (for both you and the computer opponents), in some cases it's easier to ride the wall instead of realistically turning, and there is no damage model in the game whatsoever. When you get into a head-on crash at over 100 MPH with oncoming traffic, I expect to have at least some damage. But when I do this, I have a realistic crash with real sounds, but there is no damage whatsoever to my or the other guy's car. Even for an arcade racer, this is unacceptable.
After the race, you are escorted back to the cruise mode where you are looking for the next race or the nearest specialty store to improve or stylize your "ride". And thus is where the next problem of NFS:U2 is. Some genius "black-suit" EA exec decided that you have to drive to a certain location (which is usually in some out-of-the-way place) in order to race in that event. This idea is poorly executed, as driving from one place to another is an arduous chore and can be highly confusing after a while, even with the GPS (which can sometimes ask you to do an almost full 180 at times to get there in the quickest way). And in some cases, one wrong turn will lead you to go a lot farther than you bargained for (this is highly evident in Jackson Heights).
Some other problems I noticed were that the game did not support custom soundtracks (kind of ironic that the game allows you to "trick out" your car yet you can't add on any tracks burned to your XBox).
The game also tries, almost desperately, to be "super hip" with all of the "hip young lingo" in the game. I do not want to hear my agent saying that my last race was "tight" and my "ride" needs to be "tricked out" in order to "score me some photo ops". If I wanted this, I'd watch MTV and gag myself with rerun after rerun of "Pimp my Ride". I know that they tried to get the "underground" feel of the game, but it seems the the script was written by several 13-year-old surburban white males with an unhealthy obsession with gangsta rap and "the streets". Probably not the case, but it seems that way.
Another problem is that there is product placement "up-the-wazoo" (this wasn't in the game, by the way). I'm not saying that all of the product placement is bad. I commend EA for securing the naming rights for a good deal of part manufacturers and automobiles. And I really don't mind the occasional billboard about Burger King and Best Buy here and there, but EA stepped over a fine line with having a Cingular logo plastered on the screen when I cruise around the city in my non-racing time. Okay, I know that it's business, Cingular ponied up the most money to put their rights on the game, and any developer will take another cash infusion to aid development costs, but a Cingular logo plastered on the screen and finding a hidden shop next to a Burger King don't have to do with underground racing.
In short, this game does it's job of being an arcade racer and does it well, but a few minor irks have dropped this game a star in my book, I would reccommend renting this game first to make sure that this is for you, if it is then buy it. If not, no harm to you.
"Bought this for my son, he loves it. Uses it all the time. No complaints from either of us."
"I like birhtday cake so much, but i think pie and nfsu2 are better."
