Need for Speed 12 (Undercover) - Sheridan & Willow with Dominator Corvette Z06

With Need for Speed Heat on the horizon I decided to do a quick revisit of the 21 previous NFS games leading up to the launch of Heat. Here you can see Need for Speed 12 (Undercover), which was released in 2008 for various platforms. In this game I recorded a run on Sheridan & Willow (the longest Sprint track in the game) with the Dominator Chevrolet Corvette Z06.

NFS Undercover went back to the style of Most Wanted and Carbon, with a big open city with free roam and police. It also had a new game mode called Highway Battle. For some reason this is where game devs decided that proper main menus are overrated, so you load straight into free roam and access things from the pause menu there.

This game is a strong contender for being the worst NFS game of all time because the physics in it are just absolutely awful. Just like in ProStreet the content is actually interesting. The map is huge and has a ton of events. The car list is fine once again. Maybe the story is interesting too but I don't remember because I only played it once back in 2008. But this is all meaningless when the physics are as horrible as they are in this game.

I usually don't like it at all when toxic people in my comments use words like "disgusting" to describe the physics in games because usually that is way too harsh but for the physics in this game it would probably be a fair word to use.

You might be wondering why I am slowing down so much for the highway onramp at 5% in this run. That's because this is actually a very hard corner for me to make with how unpredictable the steering in this game is. I actually touched one of the walls in many of my failed attempts there because I just couldn't do a smooth turn at the required angle.

The brief period of competitive play after the launch of this game was a joke as well. Gamepad players switched to their dpad because for some reason you would get faster times with keyboard steering and there was also something that we called the handbrake bug, which IsuckAtDriving showed in a recent video, where you would get a random speed boost after using the handbrake.

When using a wheel the handling was actually quite a bit more smooth but somehow you would get slower times than when doing less smooth runs with keyboard steering.

It's really a shame that the map and the other interesting things in the game got kind of wasted because they were put into a game with such horrible physics. With the physics of Most Wanted this might be a pretty good game.

This game was also the biggest disappointment that any game has ever been for me. I remember being pretty hyped for it because the colors of the world reminded me of Most Wanted when watching a trailer for the game, so I was pretty disappointed when I actually got the game and saw all of the flaws and ever since that experience I have never really been hyped for an upcoming video game ever again.

If you speak Dutch you can listen to world class competitive NFS player and 3-time WCG medalist Steffan talk about the game here:    • Need for Speed: Undercover met JJ en Steffan  
Maybe someone who speaks Dutch could post a translation in the comments there because I don't understand the commentary myself but I can tell that he is talking about some idiotic things in the game, so a full transcript would be interesting.

Like all 21 main NFS games Need for Speed Undercover can be played on a modern PC with Windows 10 but I don't know why you would want to do that.

I will attempt to show you all 21 existing NFS games before the release of Heat, so expect to see a video almost every day from now until the release of Heat and on some days even two. :)