Need for Speed Undercover is a return to the core gaming mechanics of Need for Speed Most Wanted, one of the better games in the series. EA Black Box has wisely gone back to what made the series interesting by dropping you on a large metropolitan area map and giving you several race types to drive through. Sadly, crazy framerate dips, jaggy graphics and unchallenging gameplay drag it back into mediocrity.

The story itself is as cheesy as ever with various live-action cutscenes starring people like Maggie Q as the leader of your undercover operations and singer Christina Milian as your grease monkey love interest. You play the part of an undercover agent sent to take down an international car thieving ring. You start out small with the local Palm Harbor gang and as you take down different gang members you start to catch the attention of even bigger fish.

There are various mission types such as circuit races, sprints, checkpoint races, cop takedowns, cost to the state races, etc. Outrun is a new race type where you need to get ahead of a car and either put a 1,000 yard difference between you or still be in the lead when the clock runs out. The weird thing about this sub-game is that you actually go into a first-person view from the car’s perspective without any gauges or a windshield. This supposedly makes it that much more adrenaline filled, but it is also pretty jarring when you’re used to the normal driving perspective.

EA Black Box has finally brought us what we’ve been pining for: Cops ‘N Robbers multiplayer. The robbers are there to steal money on the map and get it back to the safe house while the cops try to take them down once they have the money. It is actually quite fun and is arguably a similar gameplay type as your standard Capture the Flag multiplayer game. The lack of any sort of traffic is a real letdown since it is just eight players racing against each other in an abandoned area. In fact, the single-player game also suffers from the lack of traffic that games like Burnout Paradise and Midnight Club Los Angeles thrive upon.

The game is littered with problems. First off, there are the constant framerate slowdowns which are death for a game that is based on speed. The car graphics and animations as well as the wide look graphics are top notch, but everything around it is jaggy or there is a lot of pop-ins. The entire visual presentation is sketchy and inconsistent.