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Rivals also contains wireless multiplayer for two players. If you want to race against your friends, this mode works, but without many of the available options of the single-player game, it's not nearly exciting as it could have been. If you're limited to one PSP, you can play four-player games by passing the PSP around to see who can finish the fastest or score the highest in street cross, drift attack, nitrous run, drag, or circuit races. If you have a lot of competitive friends, these options will offer some additional value, but they really don't add much to the overall package.
Sounds like squealing tires and throaty exhausts are key to good racing game sound, and Rivals does a good job with this stuff. The soundtrack consists of music found in the console and PC releases of Need for Speed Underground 2, so you'll hear tracks from Fat Joe, Ministry, Freeland, Chingy, Queens of the Stone Age, and yes, the musical atrocity that is Snoop Dogg featuring The Doors performing a duet from beyond the grave with "Riders on the Storm." The music fits the action well, but one part of it really gets in the way. Whenever a new song starts (like at the beginning of a race), a little window pops up in the lower-left corner to tell you the name of the song and what album it's from. This window covers the onscreen map, which is very, very key in street cross races. This boneheaded design decision should have been rectified before release.
Also on the subject of music, NFSU Rivals uses something that EA calls EA Pocket Trax. This mode is just an overblown music player that lets you listen to the songs in the game. In one case, you can actually watch a music video for one of the songs, which is a neat bonus. But for everything else, you're treated to some incredibly lame visualizations, such as...a spinning Need for Speed logo or an equalizer that has a speedometer graphic behind it. These visualizations are pretty weak, and considering the fleeting nature of the PSP's battery life, it just seems like a real waste. It would have been nice if you could just access the game's soundtrack from the PSP's music menu instead.
If you played a lot of Need for Speed Underground 2, you probably couldn't help but notice the constant bombardment of product placement. Everything was sponsored and licensed all to hell. The good news is that, for whatever reason, Rivals doesn't contain any of that nonsense. In fact, since you can't choose the brands of upgrades you install anymore, the game almost seems slightly stripped down. You can still access licensed vinyls from various car part and stereo manufacturers, though, so if you're partial to, say, Brembo, you can fly your company colors with pride. This sort of optional branding is much less invasive than the nonstop advertising that made NFSU2 feel so cheap.
Fans of the Need for Speed Underground series will feel right at home with Rivals. It gets rid of the overblown, big-city atmosphere of the recent console release and puts the focus on getting into races--the best part of the series--very quickly. Though a few minor tweaks would have made Rivals a bit better, there's enough fast-paced driving action here to satisfy race fans.
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- Average user rating: 4.5 stars out of 7 reviews
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
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"It is very cool but the music isn't all that but what do you expect with an kinda old version."
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