


It's open, large, and filled with a half dozen racing types. Comprised of a five-part city, the fictitious urban center known as Bayview is the imaginative ideal for midnight racing speedsters. Instead, it's a reinvention, derived from the open model made popular by Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto series and racing-action games like Midtown Madness and Midnight Club. Presentation and Progression Electronic Arts' massively expanded Need For Speed Underground 2 isn't a sequel in the normal sense of the word.

The result is a startling 40-plus hour game that's well composed, packed with aggresive AI, and is perhaps a little too big for its own good. It builds out an impressive customization mode, lacking in last year's model, and furthers its reach into America's trendy import tuner culture with the appropriate dialog, music, and the addition, of all things, SUVs. An arcade racer by nature, NFSU2 expands into many new territories with a deep, complex progression system.
