Fun, but flawed.
However, the best part of Burnout - the takedowns - aren't nearly as satisfying as they were in the previous installment. While knocking cars off the road is still as great as ever, there are now new ways to take down opponents. One is traffic check, which is ramming pedestrian traffic into rivals. This may seem fun at first, until you realize that you can blindly ram though a line of traffic and take someone out, which takes away any skill whatsoever.
Even worse is the downright stupid race crashbreaker . The once-innovative aftertouch takedown has now been replaced by simply hitting the B button to blow up opponents.
These new additions to Burnout break what was fixed, and make the single player portion of Burnout incredibly easy. And speaking of single player, why the hell isn't there a single player arcade mode? Of course, anyone who has Xbox live wouldn't need a single player arcade mode, but still, it's disappointing.
On the bright side, Crash mode is simply amazing. The measly five-car pileups from the previous game are nothing compared to the flaming heaps of wreckage that you can cause in this game. Also, the graphics have improved, with beautiful-looking car models and environments rich with detail. The sound-effects are just as good, with tons of explosions, screeching metal, and objects whipping by. It's really impressive. The soundtrack, while good (no crappy punk-rock! Yay!), doesn't quite live up to the rest of the presentation.
Fans of arcade-racing should definetely check this out. It's not perfect, but you'll be having too much fun to mind.