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While this was fun to revisit, and is pretty good overall, going back to it made me realise why this game didn’t stick in my mind over the years quite as much as the sequels did, in ways that I probably didn’t realise at the time.
The core racing mechanics are good however. It still feels fun to drive, with cars feeling snappy and responsive. Races being on closed courses helps give them a certain intensity too, giving them a sense of focus. It feels suited towards optimising your lines through corners, and it can be very tense when you’re slicing your way around the track barely missing obstacles at high speeds.
But at the same time, the handling feels somewhat basic compared to Underground 2. It doesn’t have that great sense of subtlety to the grip that game did, where you could play around on the edge of control. Here it feels pretty binary, and a bit simplistic in comparison. Also the traffic in this game can be particularly annoying. In a lot of cases, it will be placed around a blind corner in such a way that you can’t avoid hitting it, or it’ll pull out from a junction giving you zero ability to react. It feels cheap and annoying, and hurts the tight feeling of nailing your lines, as you could just get screwed by the game at any moment.
There also seems to be something wrong with the physics. Going over jumps, or sometimes even just touching a kerb, can have your car flipping out and ruining your race. Usually it happens around shortcuts, but sometimes it’s in spots where you have no option but to drive over it and just hope. It seems to get worse the longer a race goes on too, suggesting this must be a bug.
And while most race types are fine, like the usual circuit or sprint races, other types are not so good. Drifting is the same as it is in U2, so kind of meh. Drag racing is awful though. A lot of how well you do depends on how well you launch your car off the line, but since this game has digital inputs for throttle, you have very little ability to control your revs. On top of that the problem with traffic is a really big issue in this mode as well. Drag races always ended up in a ton of restarts and was never fun.
The AI is pretty broken and unfair once you get deeper in to the game. The rubber banding is ridiculous, and seemingly doesn't work properly when you examine how it behaves in different situations. It produces some absurd difficulty spikes in the latter 20% of the game or so, depending on the specific race. And the way to overcome it shows just how broken it is too. As I was having such a hard time with this, I went searching online to see if other people had this problem, and turns out it's pretty well known. That led me to discover a video about the game from someone I've actually spotted around these forums (It's pretty good), and they discovered if you just take off all your performance upgrades the AI slows back down with you, making these events actually doable.
The track variety is somewhat lacking too, both visually and in gameplay. While I do like the night time city aesthetic, there isn’t really much to it beyond that. It’s basically glitzy skyscrapers or industrial areas. With perhaps one little stretch of road in some of the tracks that is like a Chinatown area. Probably the most interesting bit of the game. And there is a lot of content re-use in tracks as well, as they are all built out of chunks of each other. So you’ll be driving along the same bits over and over. It’s almost like this game was originally intended to be open world, but they cut it for time constraints. In fact I’ve always wanted to see what this game would be like if you connected all the roads and could just roam freely around. And I did briefly mess with a mod that let you do just that, but it was kind of underdeveloped, so I didn’t do much with it.
Being able to upgrade and customise your car is still fun here, although again it’s rather overshadowed by its successors in this regard. While there’s still enough there to be entertaining, it does feel rather slim in options, and the rate of unlocks isn’t great either. It takes until about 2/3 of the way through the game before you start unlocking anything decent. And the way it ties wheel size to their unlock tier is a strange and slightly bothersome limitation too.
Although with all that said, I still had a fairly good time with it. Actually in-the-moment racing is still good, which is what the bulk of the experience is, aside from those late game frustrations. It’s just that later games improved so much that it’s hard for this one to get out from under their shadow.
All this has made me re-evaluate how I think about this period in the series too. Usually I put this one at the start of the golden age of NFS, ending with Carbon. But I tend to go back and forth on whether Carbon deserves to be counted, as even though it’s a good game, that is clearly where the quality started to dip. But now I have a fresher experience of all these games to compare them against each other, and I have to say that I prefer Carbon to U1. Even if it has a bunch of problems, it’s a far more ambitious game that does a lot more. The only thing I would put U1 over it for would maybe be the handling, but even then at least Carbon doesn’t make it a race-ruining gamble every time you touch a kerb. But anyway, if U1 deserves to be in this group, which I think it does considering it was the game that kicked off this streak, then Carbon does as well.
