If you like a street racing and tuning this game won't let you down!
User Rating: 9 | Need for Speed Underground 2 XBOX
I been I big fan of the NFS games sense the 1st one on PS1. They have always been a fun game to play. But with the movie "Fast and Furious" racing games has went another way. Some was good, some was bad. NFS got there hands into it with the 1st underground game. Which did very well. It took racing games to another high. Now we have the 2nd version of the game NFSU2. I got this because I loved the 1st one and it's on-line via x-box live. One of the big things I looked forward to was tricking out my car and showing it off on the live servers. But as I started to play it, I found out it was more to this game then meets the eye. The Game play in underground 2 has changed a bit sense the 1st. It still has all the modes you learn to love (drag my fav) and some new modes like URL racing and Street X. URL and Street races takes you back to GT days where you were close racing on small tracks. I like them because it evens out the "street" part of the game and makes you play more real life racing. The Career mode has been made over completely. You can look at it like this. GTA meets NFS. It's a big city (takes forever to learn) that you can roam freely and find shops that will help out your car in different areas. And I like how they split the city up in parts (5) so at the start of the game you wont feel like it's too big. They progress you one part at a time. Other then that you’re just driving around to the shops and finding races in city. Only thing I wish could be put in was something like I save or jump point when you not racing. Cause it takes forever to get from the bottom to the top of the map. Graphics are good I like the speed effect they kept from the 1st game. But it has been toned down a lot which I think they shouldn't have done. The feel of speed and going fast is what keeps you into the races. But for the most part once you hit 100 + the effect will kick in. The car models look like they should in real life. The decals and paint jobs are very detailed and show a lot. There no frame rate problem I seen so far. Overall good use of the X-box's Graphics port. Only thing that could be done differently were the rims. If you go past 19 + they look unreal and to big for the cars, and on replays (which look great!) they seem to go through the car and look really bad. EA has been making Great sounding games lately and with this one, they went BIG. If you have a 5.1 sound system then you will love the sound in this game. The engines sounds real as you upgrade it to level 3. And tires burning rubber comes in perfect. And nos will blow you away when used. And the back speakers are used very well when passing by things on the road and cars passing or coming up on you. This game is one of the best sounding games to date. Value is forever. After getting around 55 to 65% you have unlocked mostly 99% of the game. So fixing up cars will be fun. When friends come over they can make there own custom car and race yours (no system link :( or memory card) then there's x-box live where you can play ranked and unranked games (your custom cars). So I see the replay value at 10, because the game can never get old. Well till part 3 comes out. Overall I think this game offers some good racing and good tuning which I didn't talk about much. But you can change and tune about everything on the car/engine. And with x-box live I think this will be around for a while. 
