Beautifully rendered, slick and fast, but rather surface level
THE GOOD
1) Beautiful! The backgrounds are the real value of this game, you race through some of the most in depth and gorgeous that you will find in any race game currently available. You really feel like you are screaming through european alleyways and mountainous vistas.
2) No skill needed: this is to say that a beginner can play it, but it is not what I would refer to as an unskilled game. The higher difficulty races are actually more difficult, some are terribly difficult in fact, but what is so great is that even a young kid can play this game okay, much better than a "realistic" racing game. This accessibility is a definite plus.
3) Controls: the controls are simple but responsive, what you would expect from the RR series.
THE BAD
1) No customization: this is more a concern for the whole series, but with the level of depth made possible by the X360, I was hoping for at least some level of customization. Nothing terribly in depth is needed, but racing games are much more long lived and provide a lot more replayability when some level of customization is offered.
2) Car designs: The car designs are actually kind of boring, I hate to say it, but they are. There's not a lot of unique rides being offered here, and a lot of the cars are actually pretty useless (some of the cars are obviously better than others). Overall, the game suffers from a lack of expansive car designs.
THE UGLY (besides my consistant complaint that the RR dynamics are over the top in an almost goofy way)
1) Car designs: The car designs border on the ugly. Im serious, there are some really crazy looking cars (however strange, I really wasn't struck with any sense of uniqueness even still, they were just kind of strange and ugly looking) in this. This quality could be good or bad for a game, I wasn't overly impressed with RR6's car designs, no matter how odd they made them.
2) Lack of car designs: an attractive line from the cover of the game is how many different cars there are in the game, wow! Well, this is not exactly true, since most of the "different cars" are just... well... different paint jobs (what the...?). Its sad but true. Sometimes you will be so excited because you just unlocked a car... only to find out you already have that car... now you have it in blue. . . . . . woo hoo?
Overall this is a pretty good game. It is most definitely worth a rental, and if you are in to the RR series, its worth owning. The environments are the best quality in my opinion, and thankfully its simple enough that young and old alike can play it to some degree or another. In conclusion, I recommend this game to fans of the series, to those who are not big RR fans, I would point towards Project Gotham 3 for the X360 instead.