Going Underground
- Reviewed for Xbox
- Also Available on PS2, Gamecube, PC, Gameboy Advance, PC
- Released 2003
- Developer – EA Black Box
- Publisher – EA
Up until this point, the Need for Speed franchise had always been about driving the fastest cars, cars you’d likely never actually own. It was pure motorist fantasy. Then, in 2001 The Fast and The Furious released in cinemas, forever changing (okay, not forever, maybe about 5 years?) what car culture was. Out were supercars, in were Japanese Imports, bodykits, and more neon than your average Hong Kong street.
Enter Need for Speed Underground. Here your starting car is likely to be a Mazda MX5 or a Peugeot 206 and you’ll likely finish the game in a Nissan Skyline or Mazda RX7. Beautiful cars to be sure, but you could easily fetch one in real life used for less than £10,000. These were achievable cars for your average gamer. And, we were no longer racing in exotic locales or racetracks. No, in Underground we race on the streets of the fictional Olympic City.
Notes on Completion
I finished every race in the game, thus completing the main story mode. I played a couple of quick races to check I wasn’t missing anything, but really outside of the 112 races there’s not a lot to experience other than local multiplayer races.
The game’s linear in its progression, which might feel alien to you if you’re coming off newer Need for Speed titles – Underground was the last series entry before it embraced the open world, only returning to more linear progressions in a small handful of titles out of the many that followed. There’s 111 races in the career mode, with a secret 112th if you make it all the way to the end. You do these pretty much in order with the odd interruption for a cutscene.
Things start easy enough. Opponent AI is rubberbandy but beatable, and you’ll find yourself progressing through the early races with little to no issue. However, once you hit the midpoint there’s a shift. Races become longer, opponents get faster. Drag races in particular are brutal. One small mistake and you’ll be hitting the restart button. You have to win every single race too in order to progress, so if you hit a wall you either get good or give up.
Car customisation is the major selling point here of course. At the start of the game you’ve got a limited selection of body kits, roof scoops, hoods, spoilers, paints, and vinyls. You’ll unlock more as you progress through the races through an exp system that rewards skilled driving. What I like about this system is you can engage with it as much as you want. Stock cars earn stock experience, but the more you customise your car the higher your multiplier gets. This means if you don’t care about customising your car, you’ll earn visual unlocks slower. But, if you’re always tinkering and putting on the latest upgrades you’ll earn more. It’s really rewarding and you take out of it as much as you give.
There’s also performance upgrades. These are strictly tied to career progression so you always unlock them at the same time. The performance upgrades are nice in theory, but in practice they’re basically mandatory to install as soon as they become unlocked in order to keep up with the brutal AI. By the end of the game I think the speed is a little too fast for the size of the maps. It becomes a real test of your reflexes for the final 10 races or so.
Story-wise, the game does have a full narrative. You get fully animated cutscenes at certain milestones in the career. It’s not going to blow you away, but the voice acting is serviceable, the animation is stylised so it’s not aged too poorly, and while the plot is basic (there’s a bad guy, you race a load of people until he’ll finally race you, you beat him and get the girl) it’s well told. It’s very gameplay adjacent though – you never feel like you’re racing these characters when you’re in gameplay.
Graphically the game is really good. I remember it looked good at the time, and it still holds up now. The city streets are well realised – it almost feels like an open world was built that these courses were stripped from as after a few races you’ll really feel like you can navigate these streets. You’ll see where different courses intersect with each other and will get a feel for which shortcuts are worthwhile and which ones are wastes of time or too technical to reliably pull off. The cars are the main stars of the show however with all models looking absolutely fantastic.
Music wise, the soundtrack is really good if early 2000s alt rock is your thing. It was great at the time, it’s aged pretty poorly. Lost Prophets feature heavily is all I’m saying… For the most part though, if you played any EA games from this era you know they were smashing it with the soundtracks.
Overall, Underground is a really good time even in 2026. I feel like its overshadowed by its sequel slightly, but there’s a lot to like here as long as you can power through the high difficulty spikes in the latter half of the game.
| Pros | Cons |
| Looks fantastic, even in 2026 | Major difficulty spikes in the second half |
| Great selection of cars | Story feels tacked on |
| Loads of customisation options |
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