August 17, 2004 - Electronic Arts stopped by yesterday to brief us on Need for Speed Underground 2's progress. The game is an Underground racer, through and through, but it brings a lot more to the table than its predecessor did.

  

Foremost, this new game is built upon one giant city -- free to be explored. The city itself is broken into five seamlessly loading areas, each with its own distinct visual style and racing design. The Observatory section, for instance, is comprised of narrow, winding roads, while the Industrial area features more open spaces and a plethora a shortcuts to be exploited. The other three: Downtown, Upper Class (suburban grace), and Freeway all offer there own driving nuances. Freeway centers on speed and straight-aways, Downtown on tight curves and traffic, and Upper Class on...well, we don't quite know yet.

It really has to be played to be appreciated, but the way in which all five of these areas are logically strung together in a city that offers an incredible aesthetic quality and some truly enjoyable races is just awesome. Such a city could be daunting, but EA has implemented some clever map and GPS functionality that makes it incredibly easy to find the next story mode objective, sprint race, pink slip race, circuit race, or drift race. Essentially, there is a map and it has icons on it. By selecting the icon you wish to reach (be it any of the above listed races or objectives), a Crazy Taxi-style arrow pointer will direct you -- street to street and not as the bird flies -- to your next objective. It's a very thoughtful implementation that makes the city far less burdensome than it could have been to navigate.

Of course, this game isn't about enjoying the rain soaked sights and sounds of a neon metropolis, it's about racing. The cars themselves this time around feel much heavier and easier to control. Drifting is tighter and the AI will now strut its stuff by not always giving up prime position on a line. True, car damage is still not very impressive, but new broken glass effects and some swinging trunks make battling with the AI a little more invigorating. Naturally, you'll still want to avoid cars more than hitting them, especially when traveling at 200MPH.

Pumping the nitrous is what Underground is for. This time around we'll be able to build our nitrous reserves by doing donuts, having close calls in traffic, and completing sections cleanly. Nitrous also provides the patented super blur effect, but it never becomes too disorienting to handle.

For those who want to capture their triumphant moments or painful deaths, a new Instant Replay feature has been implemented. This allows gamers to immediately pause the action and replay a portion of the track, as opposed to waiting until the end of a round to see just what the heck happened.

Through all this replaying and racing, you'll be building a garage of cars. The game now features some 50 performance parts spread across nine categories like turbo, suspension, transmission, engine, and tires. There are also around 4000 visual parts to customize and a variety of blended paint jobs are available.

Yup, EA really seems to be treating the sequel to its best selling individual console game of all time right (some seven million units of Underground have been sold at retail). We played the game for a spell today and offer our quick impressions below. In addition to that, remember to please check out the media page for all new screenshots and movies.