Need for Speed Underground 2

The next installment in the Need for Speed Underground series takes you to a free-roaming city comprised of five neighborhoods. As you explore the city, you'll encounter rival racers who will show you all the hot spots in underground racing. After each race, you can improve your car's performance with various upgrades, ranging from the gear ratio to the suspension. The game includes more than 30 tuner cars from a variety of manufacturers, such as Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota, and more. You can even challenge racers from around the world in the game's online mode.

Before I knew this game, the only thing I can think about a racing game is all race with no breaks. First of all though, the exploration mode in NFS:Underground 2 is certainly a good entertainment when you need to take a break from races to races. Not only that, during this exploration mode, you can do all sort of things other than driving through the city, ranging from modifying your car to taking special offers like being featured in magazines. It's all fun, but unfortunately, after some time, the explorable area seem to feel too small, which is very unfortunate for such a great feature. Not to mention that you don't get to go everywhere from the get go; you have to win multiple races to actually gain access to the new areas. But well, what can we say if the game doesn't really focus on that...
Now, about your cars. You start out with one car only, but after time, you can add more cars to your garage. What's more, you can modify your cars in a lot of ways, starting from tuning it for the races to giving it nice visual touches. It may look fun at first, but these customizations are, implicitly, mandatory. And to make things worse, to make good customization, you have to do very well during the game to get more parts for your rides. Add that with the fact that you have quite limited resource for all those works, and this supposedly fun part becomes less attractive.Onto the races. To start a race, you have to go to a certain place in the city, and this certain place may even be hidden, sometimes way too cleverly that finding it is mere luck. NFS:Underground 2 provides multiple types of racing, but with a catch: There's a set number of races to take, so once you finish all your favourite races, you're left with all bitter ones, which definitely hurts, though there's actually one more type of racing outside the ordinary ones but they are just tough as hell. Not to mention that during the game, sometimes some races are mandatory to advance through the game, and if that race is the kind you hate, you're toast. Also, to accompany the fact that this game provides limited amount of races, NFS:U2 will only take victories to consider whether you perform well or poorly, which will indirectly affect on how good your car can be.