Unfortunately, the first appearance of Need For Speed on the PSP is a major disappointment.
Need For Speed Underground Rivals' single player mode consists of numerous racing events. There are two modes, Circuit Race, which consists of pure racing events against up to three CPU controlled cars, and Quick Play Battle, which consists of events that test your driving skills, such as Street Cross, Drift Attack, and Drag. At the start, you choose to purchase one of a few cars, and as you win events, you earn points which can be used to upgrade your cars or purchase new ones. There are around twenty cars to drive in this game, with four bonus cars that can be unlocked. Car upgrades are either visual enhancements, which are purely cosmetic, such as spoilers, window tint, hoods, and neons, or performance enhancing, such as engine or N20 upgrades, which do affect the performance of your car. However, for better or worse, the amount of customization is kept to a minimum, and parts are simply installed without needing to tweak anything. The game keeps track of the percentage complete in your profile, as well as handing out a few awards for accomplishing certain tasks, such as clocking in at least ten hours on the game, or purchasing all the cars available.
Once you start playing, you'll notice that the graphics are decent. Athough all of the tracks are placed in a nighttime setting, the scenery is serviceable and gets the job done. Neat effects include the quasi-reflections from your winshields, and your neons illuminating the road underneath you. There's the motion blur effect to convey the sense of speed, most noticeable when you use a nitrous boost. Music in the form of the now ubiquitious EA Trax system, like it or not.
However, once you've settled in and are accustomed to the basic racing and advancement system the game has to offer, you'll run into problems with the game design. First of all, if your goal is to obtain 100% completion, be prepared to test your patience. The game is repetitive and drags out much too long. To fully complete an event, the game forces you to win each event three times, obtaining bronze, silver, and gold medal status. With maybe the possible exception of slight difficulty changes, the event remains the same each time you play through it. There are only around seven or eight different tracks, and this doesn't help the situation much. The monotony is quite apparent in Circuit Race, which not only has Novice, Pro, and Master races on those few tracks, but also a Car Spec category in which all racers use the same car. And since event has to be completed three times, you're looking at a couple hundred races on the same few tracks. It's unfortunate that EA has resorted to such a lame way to pad out the length of the game.
Then there are the questionable gameplay designs. In Circuit Race mode, the game never fails to place random traffic to hinder you at the most inopportune moments, such as when you're coming out of a turn, after a jump when you can't see ahead of you, at cross intersections, and usually gives you no time to react. You'll scream with frustration when you lose races on the last lap because of this. You'll also notice that the computer resorts to rubber band AI, which means that it will try to keep races close, and this works both ways. If you've fallen behind early, it's not too hard to catch up on a later lap, and conversely, if you're driving well, the computer is right on your heels. Also adding to the annoying things about the game are the car physics once you take to the air, which are downright silly. During jumps, if you were not aligned straight before getting air, you're likely to lose control of the car once you get back on the road. After crashes which take you airborne, gravity seems to go in slow motion, and your cars behave more like feathers than masses of metal.
The quick play battle modes provides a bit of variety, but the normal racing events lack a sense of fun, and the entire game drags out too long. The feeling I got from Need For Speed Underground Rivals is that the CPU resorts to dirty tricks to tip the playing field in its favor, and that the game punishes you for things that are not your fault. Overall, this game is a major letdown for fans of driving games.