jumping straight from my first complete playthrough of underground 1 into underground 2 really shows how much they've learned. all in all, u2 tends to feel closer to the team's original vision for the underground series.
sorry in advance, this is gonna be a longer one.
however there are some things that are, imho, just straight up worse in u2 and for some of them i don't really know why they did them like that.
speed (but not in the way you think)
first of all, speed. not speed as in car speed, but speed as in "augh it really feels like this game is wasting my time a bit with certain things". i like the open world exploration aspects of u2. driving around bayview, racing other drivers (...more on that later), finding shops, and doing those special event time trials feels nice. they obviously put a lot of effort into making the game's environment feel more coherent than in u1. with all that said:
oh my god pleas eoh fguck please i need a fast travel option pleas e please sometimes i have to get to the other end of bayview for a specific race or to initiate a special event and it's so tiresome pleas e please pleas4erle pl-1
sorry about that. but i hope you get my point. it'd be a huge improvement if the game let me jump between the different garages i've discovered at the very least. there's other ways that are already in the game2 that could be used to reward exploration.
drift races
another speed-related topic, this time pertaining to the actual driving speed, is drift races. my god they made standard drift races feel so much worse than they did in u1. while playing u1 i had some troubles with the first couple of drift races, but once i got the hang of it i was regularly racking up 100k+ points while having a great time and feeling like i was consistently improving.
i am now more than halfway through u2 and i genuinely feel like every standard drift race feels worse than the last. they're slow, the other cars constantly get in the way, the time limit is really annoying, and the special drift race physics honestly feel worse for drifting than the regular driving physics do. none of it is fun to me. i think one way they could've improved them would be allowing you to use nitrous? maybe? idk.
downhill drift races, on the other hand, are great. the downhill nature (unintentionally?) addresses my complaints about speed and weaving through traffic adds an extra challenge that i genuinely really enjoy.
outrun races
the final gameplay element i wanna mention is, as promised, outrun speed races. these are just bad. they suck. full stop. now, i can appreciate the complexity of what they were trying to pull off, i don't even know how i'd figure out who's in the lead in a completely open world setting, but it seems like they didn't either.
the only way i can describe the behavior in those races is erratic. the amount of times i've overtaken the other racer, gained the lead, and immediately lost it again despite the other car never having passed me is ridiculous. whatever mechanic they came up with for these races just straight up does not work.
it's especially annoying because you sorta have to do them if you want more unique parts to upgrade your car. i don't really know how they could be improved save for dropping a set of checkpoints on the map when you start the race and determining who's winning based on who gets to them first, but even that would be better albeit a little less realistic/immersive.
in conclusion
none of this is game-breaking for me - i would not be writing this if i didn't enjoy the game otherwise, but it sometimes makes me look forward to finally being done with it so i can get on with playing most wanted for the first time.3
another thing is that i think the soundtrack is worse than u1. i love the title track and think they did a fantastic job with it but u1's soundtrack feels more varied and generally better curated. this is entirely subjective though and i know a ton of people who really like the u2 soundtrack but i mostly play the game on mute at this point. also i just think the clean version of Get Low4 is fucking hilarious and belongs in a museum.
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yeah i know there's mods that do that but i kinda wanna get the original experience.
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i'm mostly thinking races that aren't on the map, finding shops and cash, and some of the other things that make you drive around the map like special events, outrun races, and the fact that you'd still have to drive to actual events from wherever your garage is
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i HAVE actually played most wanted before, but it was... the famously bad ds port. i hated it so much that i thought mw as a whole was just a bad entry to the series. by that time i had also moved on from playing racing games which i wasn't really super into in the first place. don't ask me why i'm getting back into them now but i do at least in part blame @masklayer and @ticky.
