Definitely a lot better than the first game in almost every way- there's more variety in city environments, the open world is neat especially considering it was the first NFS to have one (and better than MW's since there are actual incentives to exploration and you can't just do everything from the menu), Street X and sprint-type drifts are fun additions, you aren't forced to play every single race so you can largely ignore the modes you don't like, better customization and you can actually have multiple cars at a time in career mode, but there's still a lot of the same problems- you have the typical Black Box rubberbanding (which you can turn off by going to easy difficulty but the AI is such a joke without it that it just makes the game really unengaging), drag racing sucks as much as it does in both the first game and Most Wanted, circuit drifts are actually worse (why in the world are the other cars actually on the track at the same time?) and the game still kind of ends up feeling like a repetitive slog. For reference, I thought Most Wanted could probably have used a bit of trimming and that game required 125 races (including bosses) + 1 million in police bounty to finish. Underground 2 has 137 events, which doesn't seem like that much more than Most Wanted, and no police chases, but on top of races just feeling longer in UG2 in general (I have no idea if they actually are, that's just what it feels like) 24 of those events are URL races, many of which actually consist of 2-4 consecutive races on very similar tracks with more aggressive AI than usual, so the actual number is probably close to 160-180 races, plus even if the police stuff in MW can be a bit grindy it's at least something else to do aside from racing and there's no real boss races in UG2 other than the final race so it just feels like doing the same thing over and over again with nothing to break up the monotony at all. Not fun. The writing is also something else, people like to complain about modern racing games feeling really cringy and embarrassing but these old games are exactly the same, just in a 2004 way rather than a 2010s way. At least Most Wanted was actually funny sometimes

I think with some significant trimming I'd have had a lot more fun with this game, but as it is I couldn't enjoy it enough to finish it. Once again, I don't really get the appeal, especially in this day and age.