Need for Speed Underground Rivals

OK, let me be honest here for a second. I don't like the Need for Speed franchise. Yes, its a ripoff of the stupid line from that stupid movie Top Gun. Yes, the game is basically like watching some stupidass Jet Lee movie where everyone wears bling and drives shiny cars. Yes, the music is about to the level of the stuff people play while driving down the road in gray primed Honda Civics. But it's not BAD.

Now, enter in NFSUR. The Need for Speed Underground series was unique in that the game itself was pretty fun to play, had some sweet looking cars, and was just generally an enjoyable game. Playing it never really required anything along the lines of magical driving skill (like Gran Turismo), so it was very user-friendly, and overall fun. Need for Speed Underground Rivals takes this to the next step and introduces it to the Sony Playstation Portable, a system really REALLY needing some killer app games. Unfortunately, this game falls flat.



The game is essentially like a mobile port of NSFU. A nice array of cars, some nice tracks, your generic music from the series (Including hard rock and if I'm not mistaken, some rap) thrown in. Imagine the same theory: Night racing, fancy cars, a few cars on the road thrown in to be annoyances, et al.

The first thing that is actually good about this game is the graphics. While not being super-duper clear and PS3 quality, the PSP still retains to amaze me in its clarity. Let me emphasize one thing, if anything, in this review: You do not know how good the PSP screen is until you have a PSP in your hands and you're looking at it. I mean, I honestly thought the thing had more clarity than my 19" LCD monitor. I'm not kidding.

I'm having a hard time trying to come up with a comparison to how good the d*** thing looks. All I can say is this: its just plain out beautiful, no matter how you put it. And, as a bonus, the graphics arent bad.

As for the gameplay, I think this is where it somewhat drops the ball, but for a portable system, it's up in the air. Part of me says that the game should have been expanded and added to more to be somewhat on the Gran Turismo level, but that's not NFSU. The game, I must say, has enough complexity to be interesting, but still feels like it needs that much more to be interesting.



On a side note, this is more of a flaw with the PSP than with anything else, but playing this game with the digital "Stick" on the PSP is near impossible. Keep that in mind.

Overall, I liked this for a mobile game system. Not only is it beautiful, but it is a pretty fun pick-up-and-go game. I wouldnt buy it myself (I "Borrowed" a guy's PSP for a while in the Debate thing), but I will say anyone who is a PSP owner looking for racing goodness won't be dissapointed.

2 star(s) out of 5

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