Need for Speed Undercover Hands On

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Car models are more beautiful than ever this year, and procedural damage provides a pleasant alternative to looking at the same old crack in the windscreen over and over again. A series strength, the game's audio makes everything on screen almost twice as effective, with throaty engine roars and sharp squeals from the brakes when you try to avoid an oncoming bus.

And the car handling is gently improved on this outing, with a greater sense of connection between wheel and road. Slotting myself into a Highway Battle - where the task is to get a certain distance ahead of another car - the gameplay pieces all fall into place. Hurtling down a busy dual carriageway at an altogether unnecessary speed, like Burnout, the game asks you to use the traffic strategically. Cars signal as they change lanes, allowing you to manipulate events with a little careful shunting, and if you time things just right, it's possible to keep your rival clogged behind vans three cars behind you, while you weave in and out of pick-ups and lorries. Debris, such as bumpers and bonnets, also plays a strategic role in holding your enemy at bay, and things take on an altogether different level of complexity when a police car is thrown into the mix: now you have to keep ahead of your opponent, take as many risks as you can, but still avoid alerting the cops.

Moving onto a job gives a sense of how the story element is going to work. It seems that the villains I'm trying to get in with don't think that I'm a big enough criminal, so I have to prove them wrong by stealing a cop car. The problem is, the cops like their cars, and want this one back. Cue an open-world escape and evade, with at least six cruisers in pursuit from the word go.

Bright neon paint is available, but the emphasis is on more subdued colours - EA believes the custom car scene is "maturing".

While damage is purely cosmetic in most modes, in missions like this, you'll fail if you can't keep your car in nice shape. That's easier said than done, because the AI is the best I've ever seen in a Need for Speed game, with pursuers happy to ram you, eager to overtake and cut you off, or even arrange roadblocks further down the line. Helicopters alert other units to your presence as you approach, and fairly soon, you'll be wheel-deep in dust and blue bumpers. Helpful hints like "Don't Total the Car!" pop up on screen if you're taking too much damage (why can't real cars have this sort of feature?), and a bar at the bottom of the display shows you how far away from safety you are.

Inevitably, the solution lies with going off road, taking a country path for example, or busting through a set of chained gates, but it's only when I discover that the X button allows me to invoke judicious periods of bullet time where I can ram enemies through nearby barns that I start to make good my escape. Bullet time may hardly be a revolutionary feature, but it can almost always be relied upon for quick snorts of fun - use slo-mo to nudge a patrol car into a bridge section and you can't help but feel brilliant, even if the moment does have more to do with Criterion than Maggie Q and company.

Maggie Q may have been chosen for the part because she played "Girl in Car" in Rush Hour 2, according to IMDB. She was nominated for an Oscar for that.

Outside of the jobs, it was promisingly enjoyable just driving around, and, with a constant threat gauge to take into account, being spotted by random police cruisers provides regular adrenalin bursts as you struggle to ditch them in often inconvenient circumstances.

Alongside all this, there's the customisation options we've all come to expect from the series, along with an RPG levelling system - it automatically assigns points, sadly - feeding into "wheelman skills" and vehicle attributes such as the engine, suspension, and brakes. Multiplayer sounds intriguing, particularly the Cops and Robbers mode, which sees four versus four in a vehicular version of capture the flag. Most importantly, however, it really seems that the team have nailed the core experience. On the road with three cops on your tail, when you're micro-surgically timing the bullet time, the game feels a lot like a blend of the best parts of Hot Pursuit and Burnout 3. Whatever your opinion on Maggie Q, that can only be a good thing.