Street Racer Underground review

Street Racer Underground is an auto-racer where you simply have to switch lanes from left to right in order to avoid oncoming traffic. As you overtake vehicles, you’ll slowly fill up your nitro bar, but only if you do narrow overtakes. Once the bar has been filed, you can use the nitro for a quick boost.

Once you’re using the nitro, if you continuously do close overtakes of other vehicles, you’ll keep the nitro going and keep on going as fast as your ride can. Careful as if you hit another vehicle, you’ll stop dead in your tracks and have to start refilling your nitro meter bar.

The game only has two game modes: Endless and Races. The former lets your practice the game’s mechanics in order to earn as much money as possible. You’ll have a timer which requires you to reach the checkpoint before the time runs out by mastering the game’s nitro mechanic. The further you go, the further the checkpoints will be from one another making endless mode progressively more difficult.

Race mode is pretty self-explanatory. It’s the same as Endless mode, except that instead of reaching the checkpoints before time runs out, you have to out-race your competition by mastering once more the Nitro feature. The main problems with the races are that it costs money to enter the various races, meaning if you have to restart the bronze medal race for example and run out of money, you’ll need to grind in Endless until you have the amount required. Additionally, if you finish last, you earn nothing.

The hard-earned money can also be used to purchase a handful of additional rides along with changing the color, wheels and upgrading your vehicles. It’s a typical and expected feature for racing games to give players the option to customize their rides; there’s nothing that really stands out.

The game’s overall presentation screams mobile devices. Visuals are pretty basic so don’t except anything that will make you go Wow; every Need for Speed games from the sixth generation of consoles look better than this barebone game.

I’ll never understand why developers insist on porting their mobile games on consoles. While there are a few and far between exceptions of successful ports, Street Racer Underground is definitely an easy pass. What makes racing games enjoyable is having full control over your vehicle; here all you can do is go left or right. It’s a failed attempt at trying to capture the excitement of real racing games. This might be acceptable on mobile devices, but given all the options of the racing genre, save your money for something better.