OK, I know there are some avid race game fans here and there's already a thread about this game, but I feel it's yet to be represented thoroughly in gameplay and performance. I have found some tweaks that seem to work pretty well. Despite this game getting some pretty bad reviews, I thought I'd share what I've learned and experienced with it. Some of you just might get quite a lot of entertainment out of it. It's better than Pro Street by a long shot IMO.
At first play, or more like struggling through half of career mode, I was quite put off by loads of lag, hiccuping, and even numerous times having my car freeze as if in a stop motion Speedbreaker pause whilst sections of map ahead load into view. This bred a love/hate affair because quite frankly, some of the race action in the game I found addictive.
No more do you need to drive around to find random race events or even major career level up events. They're pretty much phoned to you by your contacts and at any time you can hit Tab to launch the event shown on screen, which is typically either the one you are closest to at the time or one that is part of the career mode.
I would say the game has a look and feel somewhere between Most Wanted and Pro Street, though IMHO the cars handle way better than in Pro Street and once you get the right performance tweaks going, plays smoothly enough. More on that later.
The Highway Battles are a new type of challenge whereby you must start out behind your opponent on a fairly traffic cluttered freeway and get ahead of them by 1000' to win. They start you out in what appears to be bumper or hood view by default, apparently to make the dodging of cars quicker.
I use close behind view instead because the default view IMO is too low and what they suffice for cockpit view is actually more like windshield view with a slight zoom, making the FOV all wrong for planning your moves. None the less Highway Challenge is an adrenaline rush and some of the better race action in the game.
You will also be sent on various missions by both the underground you're trying to get close to and the detective (Maggie Q) you work for. Stealing cars and getting away from cops with minimal damage to them is the main job type for the thugs, though I encountered one unique 2 part mission called Transporter (sound familiar), where you have to steal a car, then deliver a package.
Maggie will mainly send you out on races that get you deep into the underground and occasionally have you take out thugs on the road once you've infiltrated them enough to find the intel she wants. This involves using your car to bash into theirs repeatedly until it's disabled, which can involve cops in two ways. They'll sometimes be sent out to bust you in the act, but Maggie will call in undercover cops to clean up after you've disabled the thug's cars. Then there's a pretty little grease monkey named Carmen, that needs your help from time to time.
I'm nearly done with career mode (95%), and about 75% done with the game. There's no drift, but there are outruns, except they don't happen randomly by hitting your lights when near a racer, they're events you enter. There are pursuit breakers like in Most Wanted but a lot more frustating to find. They can easily devastate several vehicles if used well though.
The graphics in the game are pretty good. The sky, buildings, cars and terrain can look awesome if you have the hardware to drive it to the max, but even at lowest settings like I use it looks pretty good. I can't tell you too much about the story or it will spoil it for you, but if the ending is like it's looking to shape up, it may not be as good as Most Wanted's was.
Now for those performance tweaks. For those of you with modest spec like me you're going to have to drop a lot of things to their lowest in the menu, like World Detail (Low), World Effects (Off) and Shadows (Off). Aside from that you can go into the registry to HK_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREEA GamesNeed for Speed Undercover, and edit some of the values.
The main one is g_PerformanceLevel. Set it from 0 to 2. Some say you can also set g_CarLoadLevel to 2, but that one I question. I'm pretty sure 0 is the lower value there. At any rate, I have a P4 3Ghz, X1950Pro 512MB, 2GB RAM spec on AGP platform using XP and these are the reg settings I use.
With the above settings and everything in the menu as low as possible, except res at 1280x960 to avoid jaggies, I average 30-50 FPS, dipping as low as 20 when there are lots of cops. Believe it or not even at those settings the graphics look pretty good, better than Pro Street IMO. This game also has way better race courses than Pro Street. The sprints, circuits and checkpoint races are all very well laid out and exhilarating. There is no drag though, but I don't miss it.
Note however, there is one caveat with performance, even after the tweaks. The game still loads laggy sometimes, you'll know it right away if the menu navigates extremely slow. If that happens, exit the game then relaunch it. It seems to cure the problem. Another annoying problem I've had is occasional crashes to desktop while racing like Most Wanted did, only instead of just happening after 20 min or more of a bounty run, it seems to happen as I'm about to smack a wall hard.
It could be a physics thing due to my 3Ghz single core, which I think is below even the min spec of 3.2Ghz, or it could be memory leaks in the game, as the relaunching fix seems to indicate it doesn't cache textures well. Either way, it doesn't happen often enough to keep me from enjoying the heck out of the game, though I wish like many others do EA would release a patch. I've read they already came out with a performance patch for the 360 version that raises frame rates.
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