I have always had a soft spot for the 2001 film "The Fast and the Furious" starring Vin Diesel and Paul Walker. While the film certain didn't deserve any acting or screenwriting awards, it successfully showcased (if not over-glorified) the burgeoning street racing, car-tuning culture that was largely unknown to the mainstream at the time. Combining slick, white-knuckle car chases with a hip, pulsating soundtrack that rode a line right down the middle between electronica and hip-hop. So when EA announced its latest Need for Speed game would put you in literally the same circumstances as The Fast and the Furious' hero and retain the immersive live action video cutscenes made famous in Need for Speed's first next-gen offering, Need for Speed: Most wanted, I was more than a little interested - at least, enough to give the series a longer look than I would have normally in the past.

In Need For Speed Undercover you vicariously step into the shoes of Paul Walker's character, posing as a wheelman for hire at the bequest of Federal Agent Chase Linh, played by the attractive but rarely ever dramatically challenged Maggie Q. Agent Linh is determined to crack an international smuggling ring that is somehow tied to the local Tri-Cities syndicates and sees you and your skills as a way of getting a reliable set of eyes and ears within their ranks. During your infiltration you'll come face to face with a number of seedy characters as well as love interest in the form of a female grease monkey named Carmen, played by Christina Milian. In order to maintain your cover, you'll often have to run afoul of the law and sometimes even hurt fellow lawmen and innocent civilians. As Agent Linh explains, "you're not good, and you're not bad". Unfortunately, the same can be said for the game itself.

Gameplay:

NFS Undercover's campaign mode comes in seven plain vanilla flavours: Hot Car (Steal and deliver a car to a buyer), Wheelman (evade the cops and stay out of sight until they give up searching for you), Highway Battle (catch up to, pass and maintain a lead over a rival driver), Sprint (race across a section of the city against seven opponents), Circuit (win a multi-lap race against seven opponents), Outrun (get and stay ahead of the pack in an open world race until the time runs out), and Checkpoint (race to waypoints around the city before time runs out). Advancing through the story is simple. Just complete enough of the above missions until Linh or one of your so-called allies calls you with a "Job", which is usually a variation of the above game modes. Upon completion you are rewarded with "Wheelman Rep" that earns you more trust in the organization, allowing you to collect more evidence against the gangs. Once you've completed enough jobs and Linh has enough evidence, you are rewarded with "Boss Chasedown" missions where you hunt down your former gang allies and render their vehicles immobile before their minions do the same to you. Ironically, in the world of Need for Speed, these high-octane, massive collateral damage-dealing car chases serve to protect rather than expose your cover (wouldn't most street racers get on their cell to let their buddies know they've just been betrayed by their wheelman?).

On the bright side, those who found the controls in Most Wanted stiff and unnatural will thankfully have much less to complain about this time around. Powerslides are easier to execute and most tight turns can be navigated even without the handbrake. The Speedbreaker function, which a la Prince of Persia slows down time to allow you to pull off risky maneuvers at high speed is still available, but there are very few times where you will actually need it. To get right down to it, nearly every race, pursuit, chase or job in NFS Undercover is shockingly easy. This is not to say that the occasional Circuit or Boss Chasedown will not provide a challenge, but since every mission can be restarted and replayed with no penalty, it will usually only take a few restarts to complete a particularly pesky task. This is probably good news for players that are new or have little experience with the series, but more experienced racers will definitely be turned off by this.

Chasedowns and Boss Chasedowns are one area that will make many wonder why NFS developer Black Box did not work harder to adopt or obtain technology from Criterion, the EA owned team famous for the vastly superior Burnout franchise. Simply put, ramming enemy cars in NFS Undercover is a laborious chore because there is no way of knowing what kind of technique will work, or how much damage you are dealing. You can't simply run an enemy off the road and let the combined force of their velocity and a building do the rest of the work for you; every single opponent must be battered over and over again until their car finally decides to say uncle and awkwardly grinds to a halt (even if you flip a car it will right itself and keep on going).

Complicating matters further is that instead of using energy bar indicators that would have clearly indicated enemy health, Black Box decided to go with vague "shady men in hats" indicators that progressively change from green (healthy) to flashing red (about to die). Not only does this make it harder to tell just how much more effort you need to dedicate to a particular enemy, but since the health indicators of allies look exactly the same, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish friend from foe at a distance, which will often lead to you hurting the people you are supposed to protect. The "Rematch" level with Carmen is a perfect example of this.

Graphics:

There are many other aspects in this game that also could have benefited from Criterion's expertise. The overall look is certainly improved over Most Wanted, but in general the game has hardly made the graphical leap that one would expect for the fourth iteration of the franchise, and in this generation of consoles. Civilian vehicles look horrible compared to player and NPC cars, and during races they often appear in the exact same place when you restart a match, giving the feeling that they are running on pre-determined schedule just to get in your way. The framerate remains steady in most cases but will often dip during circuit races when there is other traffic on the road. Finally, for a game inspired by street racing culture, it is curious that just about every race takes place in broad daylight, often as early as 7am in the morning, when you would think most experienced illegal street racers would be getting their beauty sleep.

Audio:

Sound is one area where NFS Undercover delivers surprisingly well, particularly in the area of the game's soundtrack. Having been a long-time Burnout fan, I can say from experience that most licensed EA soundtracks force me to fire up the custom soundtrack feature that's built into the Xbox 360. But in the case of Undercover, the heavy, electronic, bass beat-driven music of both the licensed tracks and thematic, context-sensitive chase music strongly evoke the better parts of the aforementioned The Fast and The Furious, and help to provide some much-needed feeling of immersion in Undercover's similarly implausible storyline. More kudos for the track selection for the game's Garage mode, which offers a trance/lounge-influenced selection with a slower, relaxed tempo - the perfect, relaxing Ying to the pulsating, hard-hitting Yang of the streets. Likewise, the pleasing, authentic roar of aftermarket engines and squeals of tires on asphalt will be very familiar to NFS fans, but the attention to detail in sound design also shines in more subtle ways, such as the manner in which police chatter quickly and realistically responds to your actions in high speed chases and how realistic flying dirt and gravel sound when you drive off-road.

Longevity:

How long you spend with this game will largely depend on how much you enjoy the game's core mechanics and selection of game modes. Completionists can replay and restart any mission to their heart's content, and there are over 55 real world cars to purchase or unlock, all of which can be customized with aftermarket parts, upgrades and unique paint jobs. By the same token, an average player can blow thorough the entire game in only a few evenings, skipping non-essential missions and customizing only a handful of cars, but the game's low level of difficulty, coupled with the aforementioned wash, rinse, repeat gameplay and non-engaging story provide little reason for non die-hard NFS fans to stick around that long. The game does provide a "Cops and Robbers" online mode to give players something else to do after they've beaten the campaign, but it only takes a couple of spins to see how broken and tacked on the mode is. If you're not interested in skidding and sliding around with seven other people like a bumper car on acid, you should just skip the online entirely.

Overall:

More forgiving Most Wanted fans will find a lot to like in NFS Undercover. The game offers better controls, the same if not better production values (particularly in soundtrack and sound design), and a wide selection of real-world cars complete with visible (although temporary and cosmetic) car damage. Unfortunately, very little else has changed in terms of gameplay since Most Wanted's release in 2005, and the lack of any real challenge, learning curve, lasting consequences of any kind for failure or even an engaging plot only ensure that no one outside of absolute newcomers to the series or die-hard fans will have a reason to spend more than a few hours or rental dollars on this title. Channeling The Fast and The Furious was definitely a good idea, but a cool premise can only take a game so far on its own.