The sprints, highway battles, races and escapes are all fine -- it's the largely dull and unimpressive environment they are all set in that quickly gets old. The 'golden hour' lighting effect which dusts the landscape of the game does a good job of making it look pretty, but you still eventually get the feeling that you've raced the same street over and over.

The Tri-City area is, in other words, remarkably devoid of landmarks as well as pedestrians and the fact that there are often good ten-minute stretches without any traffic to dodge through doesn't help.

At the start of the review we said that the two important keywords for the / /Need for Speed series are style and brevity. You could argue that 'speed' should belong there too, but it kind of goes without saying. The issue with //Undercover though is that it's started to show us just how shallow those things can be.

It quickly becomes obvious that when you finally do get under the covers with / /Need for Speed then it's all sack and no substance. That's not enough to impress my girlfriend and it's not enough to impress me either.