I never played the original, but I'm blown away by this game.
1. Fun destructable cars where cars explode upon impact with all the parts flying every which way in the smoke. Notice the silvery surface of your brake rotors as your wheels fall fly off !
2. Amazing FPS. Runs fast like a 3 year old game on my less than top-of- line computer. But the levels are first rate without a doubt -and with alot of variation. The developers made some crafty tradeoffs, I think , in render quality. The weather and general atmospheric effects might be a little static compared to NFS, but they are still convincing.
3. Fun mini drving stunt games that are part of the campaign.
4. Bodies eject from cars upon nasty collisions
5. Physics are wonderful....different from NFS... Sort of that same buttery arcade feel, but this games also seems to mimick real physics in a fun way that's believeable.
6. Under $20 fast download. Now the only thing I don't like: For some reason, I can't see the gear display in the destruction events. There's no visual information about what gear your in. I don't know exactly what's up with that. Minor. And it's too hard to get into reverse when playing with manual transmission with a gampad.
Oh, one more thing: The interface doesn't work right with the gamepad. One has to use the keyboard to switch game modes. These are gameplay issues and that's why it got an eight. But have fun. This is a great racer.