Such a fast paced racer is exhilarating, but it does tend to slow down too much. Nice features and excellent game play!
Burnout is now in an open city, Paradise City! Which coincides with a Guns and Roses song. The city scape is gorgeous with a wide variety of urban, rural and full sky scraper sections, each with stunning visuals. The cars look fantastic with superb reflection and lighting effects.
The sound is wonderful, excellent crash sounds and engine purs, but the sound track itself leaves you wondering who? Most of the time. I knew Guns and Roses, Twisted Sister and Avril Lavine (odd choice, her Girlfriend song annoys me) but she is Canadian so rock on. But the rest of the bands I had no clue who they were, nor did I like their tunes. Turned off the sound anyways to hear mics and listen to some Zeppelin.
Controls feel tight and responsive, totaling a very high production value to this game. At least with the aspects that are included. Driving around the city is fun for half an hour, you stop at crossings to rev your engine and start a race, road rage, marked man, stunt run or a specific mission for a certain car. The map is confusing, and for some reason I always wound up west in the rural part. Opening up the map is necessary, but theres a load time which causes a stall.
Races take you all over the city, so opening the map is required. Which detracts from the experience. Road Rage is the most fun, just driving into cars to make them crash. Problem is, the open world has little interaction. Driving into a junk yard to change a car, paint shop, gas station and repair station which are all drive throughs and simple boxes, railings, lamp posts for knocking over. You reach speeds that are so fast you inevitably lose control and crash. Crashes are spectacular! Which is bad, because then you get a slow motion camera angle and the game all of the sudden focuses on just you crashing. During a Race this combined with constantly bringing up the map is VERY annoying. Highly unprofessional to capitalize those letters like that, but the emphasis is important. The game becomes annoying. Taking any re playability away.
That being said, it offers a neat online mode. You simply connect right to a server wherever you are in the city and bam! Your online with up to 7 other players. You can now complete online missions with them, and race. I raced with this one guy for like an hour chatting about Uncharted and Call of Duty 4. Which I found myself wishing I was playing Call of Duty 4 instead. The online without a mic, would become the same as single player.
Finally, for me at least I think racing games need a certain aspect to be truly enjoyable. If you like racing games, then no doubt you like cars. We all like cars whether were enthusiasts or not, we all like those Ferrari's and Porches. The cars in this game, are not real. The developers seemed to have preferred buying the rights to no name bands then real brand cars. They're like duplicates, but I can't say which was my favorite since they're quite forgettable. Real cars would be neat so we can act our fantasies of tearing up the streets in high class sports cars.
The combined aspects of what I'm picking at really detracted from the whole experience which is sad. The core concept and engine of the game is wonderful. Play it. In my own opinion I wouldn't buy it because I'm picky, but it truly is a magnificent game that can't be missed.