Need for Speed: Underground 2 (2004)

Now I've been trying to get my hands on a physical copy of this game for years now. After scavenging a random retro shop in Adamstuen in Oslo, I found it tucked away deep in the shelves for a mere 200NOK. What a moment.

I distinctly remember playing this game as a kid, endlessly just driving around at night with the neon on and having sessions where I even tried to drive more safely and according to real traffic rules. For me, it was one of my early open-world games, and my first open-world racing game probably. I remember playing it so much until an unfortunate scratch on the disk made the loading screens get stuck in a loop, and I had to discard the disk.

It's hard to describe the feeling of booting it up on my PS2, now probably 15 years later, for the first time. It's pure joy. The nostalgia is nice.

First of all, the vibes. The vibes are absolutely incredible. The clearly Y2K designs and music, along with the graphics, combined with the fact that you only drive at night in a fairly poöluated world, is a really cool and slightly liminal feel. And then the rain hits as you hit that last lap in the race, and it really completes the experience for me.

The different game modes are fun, and you can just kind of go around and knock them out. It's a great time to just turn off your brain for a while and relax, without it feeling like some kind of list of chores. Unlocking upgrades and custom parts is fun and really drives the progression and wanting to progress through the "story".

I think this game still holds up. It's not crazy, but the vibes are great, and it reminds me of a simpler time, when racing games were just racing games, and we could take a few moments of our day to just race around Beverly Hills in the rain. Haven't seen a better racing game since this.

After putting this for awhile, I decided to wrap it up, finish the story, and conclude my journey with this game. I will admit that I'm more fond of this game. but on the other level, I feel like this game with all its improvement, it is more or less a very aged experience of its time. the course designs are really great, the feeling of the game is absolute magic, the controls and almost everything is better improved upon the first Underground release, but the game is more or less showing that it was a product of its time.

The game drags its length in such a terrible state, and the AI is not there to challenge but rather to infuriate. making doing upgrade your car or changing it acting like a secondary option to have rather than a fully fledged feature that you should work carefully with to get the best tune out of your car to beat specific racers. instead, you're to work by screwballing your car to make sure you're exploiting the game to win most of the win which is no fun for me.

The game isn't bad, however. just don't go in trying to max-out everything that the game has to offer because the game is only operating within its own sphere. it's still got the charm, a great control, great licensed soundtrack, and a ton of other things to enjoy. however, you will find yourself frustrated rather quickly due to the game's inner design decision of its time.

Quick update on my playthrough so far:

the game is a very solid improvement over the original with lots of things that were resolved over the original. I can't describe how great it was to not flip flop throughout the track because of a traffic bump or from other cars. the customizations were greatly expanded upon and the 'Underground' feel of this game is much better.

Rubber-banding is still awful, but less crazy, and you have much more room to workaround it.

Rating: ★★★½ (Good)

Black Box once again takes a ride in the development of Need for Speed. Underground was a huge success, and it was only natural that EA would request a sequel. This time, they ditch the grittiness of The Fast and the Furious, and applies some glamour, as the game develops its own personality in a world full of flashy lights, neons, and advertising.

Underground 2 takes place in the city of Bayview, a fictional city based on the west coast. Taking advantage of the lighting system they developed for the previous title, city's full of lights, neons, and whatever you may think to make it bright. City's beautiful, no doubt, and its design is outstanding, giving you a feeling of a massive open world to explore, even though it's not that big.

The game is split in five stages that play exactly the same: Buy a car, tune it up, win X street races, win Y racetrack races, and get into Z magazines or DVD covers. In between each of these steps, you travel the city in order to get to the shops and events. And here lies the biggest problem with this title. All of this, has no variation. It's the same over and over, just with more events. At the fourth stage, you start to wonder why should you go and clear the city map once again. At the fifth, you really see no point and is likely to drop the game.

The problem is not the driving, on the contrary, driving is great. All of the drawbacks I had with Underground in this front were fixed: City traffic isn't designed to disturb, AI performance is properly balanced, and the handling is splendid. I mean, it's arcade glorious. The car responds very well to the joystick, and is very grippy. Unlike Underground, though, the city and tracks have too many corners to be able to enjoy any sense of speed. In fact, I think even in the straights, that sense isn't there.

Maybe it's the story. It's very weak, with cheesy everything: Characters, voice and text. At a certain point I stopped reading any of the text because it's embarrassing. Indeed, I even forgot it had any story at all. With no narrative urgency, it may feel silly to do the same thing over and over again. Certainly a step down from the previous title.

There is also a few design issues I'd like to pinpoint. The first being that you may have all the patience to finish the five stages, and yet be unable to beat the game 100% (as in completion-ism), simply because you missed a hidden race, or a outrun event in one of the stages. The game also has SUV races, which aren't fun in my opinion because driving them is complicated and unsatisfying. Thankfully, they aren't mandatory. Also, the game still contains a visual reputation system, forcing you to rice, but it's worse here since customization is everywhere. Much like Underground, there's a mod to remove this system so you can properly enjoy tuning.

Underground 2 is not only bad things though! Customization, for example, is incredible. You can customize nearly every aspect of your car, and it doesn't even feel overwhelming. The car models are top notch, as well as their sounds. Each car, at each performance upgrade level, have unique engine sounds. The sound of skidding isn't PS1ish, and you can clearly hear the effect of your Turbo, or the feedback of shifting gears.

The soundtrack is also great, with flashy songs that very much combine with the atmosphere of Bayview. However, it feels repetitive after a while given that you spend a lot of time navigating the map and entering/leaving events, enough to make the music loop every forty minutes or so.

All in all, I wish this game was better. This was one of my childhood favorites, and revisiting it after so many years to see a game full of buts is saddening. The cars, driving and atmosphere remain great, however its repetitive nature is hard to put aside.

Need for Speed: Underground 2 was one of my favourite games when it was released though revisiting it now shows some of the flaws it has that I hadn’t noticed. Whilst the handling is quite fun the artificial difficulty, limited tracks and annoying AI ruins some of the enjoyment. The customisation is good but the requirement to meet expectations results in you designing your car not to meet your personal tastes. The game runs and looks good on modern systems which surprised me and a good selection of tracks in the soundtrack.

Gameplay

Underground 2 is an ‘open world’ racing game, in which you as the character drives around to various different racing events. Through winning races you earn money to purchase new cars and cosmetic and performance upgrades. There is a decent variety of events in both street circuits and designed race circuits with race, drift and drag modes. The handling model is pretty decent, though the cars feel too heavy for the arcadey nature of the game and it feels kind of conflicted.

The game is very long, surprisingly for the genre. Unfortunately the long length really gives time for the flaws to shine through. There are a few aspects in particular that get worse with time. Firstly is the artificial difficulty, the opponents do not race according to their skill and their car’s capabilities at least from the split times and overall times it doesn’t seem like it. 90% of races are like this: race start, and the opponents will get ahead of you, after a few turns you will probably get ahead (easily unless the AI attacks you), then the AI will keep up within 2-3 seconds behind you. Almost every race follows this format, which after a long game (maybe 15 hours?) really begins to grind on you. Another main flaw that begins to show is the limited number of courses/tracks especially the designed circuits which have a few layouts each but often feel the same.

A large part of the game is the cosmetic customisation of your vehicle. You have an extreme amount of options for customising the body, colours, decals, lights, hydraulics, doors and even the trunk. Unfortunately the way customisation is handled during the career mode limits the scope of your customisation. Through the campaign you must reach certain “star levels” which are gained through customisation. The result of this is that you are not able to customise your car to your tastes and are pigeon-holed into overly tweaked and often awful looking cars just in order to meet objectives.

Presentation

Underground 2 is 13 years old now so I’d expect it to look fairly bad, though I was quite surprised. Using a simple mod Underground 2 runs flawlessly at my QHD resolution with a decent level of texture and model detail. What was most surprising however was the stability, through the long game I only experienced a couple of crashes but fortunate autosaves means that all I had to do was relaunch the game and lost no progress. I didn’t really listen to the soundtrack but it seemed to have a good mix of heavy rock, hip-hop/R&B and electronica. The engine sound effects are inferior to future entries in the series but they’re fairly realistic and good to listen to. Overall I was impressed at how well Underground 2 runs on my modern system and remains graphically decent.