This Need for Speed ​​Underground 2 fan remake in Unreal Engine 4 brings the good old days back to life

If you ask a Need for Speed ​​fan about the series’ golden age, they’ll throw two or three different titles at you. None of them younger than twelve years, it is so bad for the traditional series. However, one of the games that fans still love to this day is Need for Speed ​​Underground 2 from 2004. And now it’s getting a remake.

Well, it’s basically a fan mod, but it’s already doing pretty well, as can be seen from a video posted by developer Ivan Novozhilov on his channel:

Novozhilov uses Unreal Engine 4 for development and the rain-soaked streets at night come across quite well and quite complete, including the music from Underground 1, 2 and the first Most Wanted and a weather system.

The question is whether EA will keep its feet still and let the developer continue, or whether Novozhilov will get a letter from the lawyer soon. But anyway, these projects are often fan finger exercise and a way to get people talking. Be it for collaborations or professionally.

It’s not the first time this game has garnered attention in modder circles. There is also a ray tracing mod for the base game, as well as new textures that you can click on moddb can download.

EA stumbles

As far as Need for Speed ​​goes, I’m not entirely sure what’s causing the series to rub through the ditch so much. After EA had incorporated the burnout makers from Criterion Games, things should have gone steadily uphill with the series. Instead, however, these arcade racer experts also stumbled after the great Hot Pursuit before they had to hand over the series to Ghost Games … who also acted rather unluckily, most recently delivering Need for Speed ​​Heat and are now called EA Göteborg again and with 30 other studios allowed to work.

In any case, time and again, surprisingly little sense of proportion was shown in reading the signals of the community. Time and time again, people tried to have these games tell stories that nobody really wanted to hear and they were annoying with a street racing subculture flair that was just as super cool as it was tried.

Maybe things will get better now that Codemasters’ expertise has been acquired?

Maybe it really needs a modder who underlines once again when the series had its strongest days, so that the “headquarters” reflect on old values ​​again.