This will best serve any driving fans on PS3, but for others, it just burns out.
However, this is not an entry point into the genre. For gamers who don't particularly like racing, the first few hours are entertaining, but slowly descend into, quite literally:
-Drive to race
-Lose race
-Drive to another race
-Win race
-Lose next 5 races in a row because of the lack of a marked route
-Win race
If you are lucky, you will manage to find one of about TEN road rages scattered across the repetitively dull city, which, along with Show Time mode, are the only good parts of this game. Road Rage is classic Burnout, the objective being to ram other competitors off the road. Unfortunately, the Road Rage:Bland annoying race ratio is horrible (1:50 maybe)
Show Time mode is activated by pressing L1+R1 at any point after getting a D License. Your car will dramatically spin into the air and somehow turn into a wreck. The objective, like Crash mode in earlier games, is to get money by crashing into cars and covering long distances. This is repetitive, but still quite a lot of fun.
Also missing is offline multiplayer. How on earth can you have a racing game with no offline multiplayer?
Stunt Run is useless.
And with a few exceptions, the sound track is horrible.
Now onto the (perilously few) good points:
These are the best graphics of any racing game I have ever seen, even putting some other genre games to shame.
The promise of new cars manages to keep you interested, at least at the start when you think there
might be some difference between them (there isn't)
The sound effects are top notch
The controls are superb
Winning is extremely satisfying, simply because it is so god damned DIFFICULT!
The open ended city is great, but being able to leave your car *ducks audience throwing tomatoes* would add some interest and kill some of the repetition (notice how many times I have repeated the word repetition/repetitive)
As I said at the start, definitely worth a pick up for any fan of racing, but otherwise, there are MUCH better games out there.