Need For Speed Underground 2 Looks Better Than Ever in New Remake

Need for Speed: Underground 2 remains as one of the most fondly remembered racing games of the PS2 era, and this new remake may be a good reason to revisit it.

The Need for Speed series has been going strong for over 30 years now, and with a new entry releasing as recently as three years ago, it’s showing no signs of stopping.

While we may have to wait a bit longer for whatever the next Need for Speed game is, one fan has dedicated themselves to remaking Need for Speed Underground 2, one of the more popular entries in the franchise, in Unreal Engine 5.

Created by Need for Speed fan and Unreal Engine developer apfelbaum, this remake of Need for Speed Underground 2 looks absolutely stunning, if you ask me. The intention behind the project is to take the entirety of the original game and recreate it in the modern engine.

While it’s still in development, the final release will include the entirety of career mode, as well as the game’s famous Bayview open world.

You can access this as part of a demo that’s available now, however be warned that the remake is currently missing some vital features like AI opponents and traffic.

This is obviously not an intentional omission, considering how essential that is for a racing game, it’s simply down to the developer needing more time to implement these features. But you may want to hold off until they are added.

As for what’s new in the demo’s latest build, apfelbaum has added new weather effects and car paint models.

The new thunderstorm effects look particularly great, and expands massively on the limited weather model that was available in the original game. It sounds like the developer is not only adding in all the features from the original release, but also adding in new ones without altering the direction too much.

You can grab the demo for the Unreal Engine 5 remake of Need for Speed Underground 2 from RPGGameplay’s Discord server, who also supplied the footage seen in the video above.

Need for Speed: Underground 2 was released back in 2004, and is one of the more popular racing games of that generation, particularly on PlayStation 2. It was the first game in the franchise to feature an open world system, featuring a playable space inspired by the U.S. cities San Francisco and Los Angeles.