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Well it is a new year, and we have ignition on the latest version, Need For Speed: Underground. The heavy European thoroughbreds are out and the light 'n loud rice-burners are in. Underground steers directly for the street racing fans, jumping on the bandwagon of the growing popularity of this pastime. The console version has to compete with some other very popular and acclaimed titles, but on the PC front, it stands alone.

As far as game play goes, Underground keeps it fairly simple with some classic NFS features, while borrowing others from the likes of Gran Turismo. The core of the game is about street racing, specifically the variety frowned upon by the worlds' authorities. The basic idea is unchanged from the first NFS game. Race against other cars, win and progress onto the next set of races until you have won them all. From there on in, Underground tosses in a few new features. The game is pretty much in two parts, a quick racing section and the Underground section. Underground is more the career path type game. You win races to proceed to the next level, unlocking levels as you go for use in the quick races. You're racing for money, which increases with the difficulty, but you're also racing for street cred. With the money you earn, you can buy new cars, but you can also customise your car with parts from an amazing number of real world part makers and car modifiers. Add a Koni and Stillen suspension package, get an HKS turbo and then work your way up to NOS. You can also paint your car, and add accessories like tints, mags, spoilers and body kits, neon, and vinyl stickers of all kinds. The phat-er your car looks, the greater your reputation, and reputation can multiply the amount of street cred you earn during each race. The more street cred you get, the more modification, car and track options that get unlocked. It's a big cycle. While buying car mods isn't new, the reputation levels and street credit are an attempt to inject some racing culture into the game and they work quite well.

You can only have one car at a time in Underground mode, and once you pass the initial race, you will be forced to buy a car from a list of some of the less powerful cars on the lot. As you progress though the game and your car gets better, the game will always pit AI cars against you that have about the same ability level so the racing is always tight and fair. In Quick Race mode, you don't need to buy cars and modifications are free. You are only limited by what has been unlocked in the Underground mode. There are 5 main race types. Circuit is the traditional race against other cars on the same course for X number of laps, where as Sprint is a single lap only, and Knockout is where the last place car at the end of each lap is eliminated until there is only one left.

New to the NFS scene is drift racing where the whole idea is to get points by driving through tight corners on a track sideways. The better your slide or drift through a corner, the more points you score and the most points wins. Hit a wall however, and you risk losing any points you made during that drift. Finally there is the Drag race. This has a different control style with your main steering not being so important, but a secondary steering control is used for changing lanes quickly, which is vital for avoiding obstacles like median barriers or traffic. Drag racing gets rid of the normal set of gauges and replaces them with a large tacho which you use to judge the best time to shift, as the speed you can achieve relates directly to how well you can time the gear changes, and later on Nitrous comes into play. You will need to master all of these race types during the course of your career.

Being a game that models illegal street racing, all races take place at night. Close the curtains if you are playing during the day and still hope to see the road. The tracks are beautifully presented, and make for some great places to race, and throw up the usual set of challenges you would expect from a NFS game. There are the obligatory short cuts thoughout the courses as well as a good serving of jumps. Being in an urban environment, Underground resolves the issue of keeping you on the course by having huge neon arrows blocking off side streets and intersections, which aren't part of the race. If you do go down one of these streets, the game kicks you back to the main road.

There are 3 different kinds of tracks. The normal road tracks, drag strips set on motorways or industrial areas, and go-kart like tracks for the drift racing. While there is a number of each of these tracks, there is not enough variety in the tracks for our liking, even with different road surfaces. The street courses all borrow common sections from each other, and as such, they all look too familiar after a while and made us yearn for some different scenery.

The actual racing is a heck of a lot of fun as you move through the game. The AI are challenging while still being able to make mistakes. They won't become quite the traffic magnet you can though. As you modify your car, the characteristics will change and it will drive differently. Underground feels very much an arcade racer though, and this may be totally intentional. Old school fans may be a bit disappointed at this, but the game allows multiplayer games between PC and PS2, and that alone says a huge amount about what kind of racing you can expect. You can bash into cars, and the AI will bump you into the path of oncoming traffic if they get a chance, and there is absolutely no damage model. Even the modification process screams of Gran Turismo-ism, but that's not to say the racing isn't fun, or requires little skill. You can't expect to bounce off the walls and retain your speed, or even end up facing the right direction. There is a strong requisite for clean racing, and you even get rewarded for it. What this means is you have to use your brake. Yes, that little pedal to the left of the Go-faster switch can say a great deal about a game, and you will be hard pushed to win a race without using it.

We weren't convinced about the benefit of using a wheel in Underground. The response didn't seem fast enough to us, or at least the game really needed the instant response of a digital controller or a short analogue stick, which could be a throw back to its console-ness. The game has no allowances for altering the response of the steering, although it does have force feedback support that is implemented as well as any game of this kind.

Underground is a stunning game to look at without a doubt. The wet-look roads are perfect for reflecting your neon tubes you just put on your car. The cars look awesome and there are all the now expected graphical goodies like reflections, motion blurs and the environment is really well made. Races start and end with dynamically rendered cut scenes showing you and the three other cars in the race lining up and then an animated character starts the race. For all its graphical beauty though, we do have couple of gripes with the visual and view system. Firstly, there are only 3 different views, bumper cam and 2 external views. No internal view, or even a bonnet cam, which is a real shame. Secondly, although there is a slo-mo static camera that cuts in during the race if you happened to get a really good jump, or have a particularly large bash into an oncoming car, there is no replay function for you to relive your race from the eyes of a bystander. We think this takes a huge amount of the entertainment value away from the game, by not allowing the players to watch their race.

Underground comes with a pretty good selection of audio tracks to play while racing, made up mostly of hip-hop and rock. You can choose the songs you want to listen to in the options or just chuck it on random. The sound in the game could have been taken directly out of the Fast and Furious movies, which is somewhat hollywoodish, but the nice thing about the sounds is that we really have nothing to complain about. They actually fit nicely with the game.

There are many things we like about Need For Speed: Underground, and there are a number we don't like. As an arcade game, it holds its own, but if you expect a decent racing simulation, you will be disappointed. There is nothing particularly ground breaking about it, but it does offer a unique racing experience for PC users. It may have some areas we think are lacking or missing, but it never looks like it is an unfinished or unpolished product. We're sure it will be fun at a LAN as well as at home, but we can't help thinking that including a replay feature, and adding some different tracks could have upped the fun factor big time.