Need For Speed Undercover is about as undercover as a fully-modded, chrome-rimmed Mazda RX3 on the London to Brighton vintage car rally.

This isn’t a stealthy racing sim where you’re keeping one on the rev counter and one on the rear view, pumping the brakes gently on every curve. It’s a balls-out scream-fest with your foot nailed to the floor, The Prodigy blasting from some serious ICE and a bottle-blonde in the bucket seat next to you with her nails latched on your arm.

We'd like to say we went for a spin with this latest game but in reality, we went for a full peddle-to-the-metal track day, just to see how well it handles in the flesh.

Need For Speed Undercover is fun, fast and furious - it’s also extremely difficult. After we’d been wiped out for the fourth time in a row, we thought it must be us doing something wrong. It was. We simply weren't going fast enough.

Like many street racing games, Need For Speed Undercover has auto acceleration and nitro boosts, but it also has some neat extras. Tuck in behind an opponent and you’ll gain a few mph by slipstreaming, just enough to nip past him and nudge him into an oncoming Subaru. It’s that kind of nasty.

The other racing feature to master is drifting. Take a corner too fast (or just fast enough, some might say) and you enter drifting mode. Here you have to balance a wobbly graph to keep it in the green zone – the faster you’re going, the more ‘drift points’ you’ll earn but the more likely you are to spin out but. This side of things is (fairly) realistic: spin out or hit an oncoming car even once and you’re basically out of the race, no matter how much nitro you’re packing.

Undercover’s graphics are fine – better than Asphalt 4 at least - with smooth animation, good rendering and natural physics but a touch of pixellation. Audio tends towards the tinny and annoying but you can always turn that off. Naturally, you can power up your ride at the end of each race, and move on to different courses and missions.

Overall, a refreshingly difficult – but never irritating – street racer that will have you coming back for more.

Details

Price: £4

Rating: 3+

Size: 3MB

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