Best arcade racer ever.
Graphics: Awesome. This thing is fun to look at. Everything looks great. The damage modeling is great, and after a while your car can look like a total wreck, but just drive through a car repair, and waalaa, it's back to looking new.
Gameplay: Awesome. You have 3 classes of cars: Speed, Aggressive, and Stunt. You can use any car for any event, and they all have different characteristics, but obviously certain cars are better for certain events.
The events include: Races, and you do not have to follow the other cars, but can find your own route if you choose.
Marked Man, where you try to get to a destination and others try to stop you.
Road Rage, where you try to wreck a certain number of cars.
Stunt Run, where you preform stunts and try to collect multipliers to increase your score.
Burning Routes, which are car specific events that if you win you get a different version of the car you used.
They also have non-event things to do like Road Rules, where you try to get the best time on a road section when you are not in an event, but just driving around.
Showtime, where you initiate a crash and try to keep it going hitting cars and buses and road signs, for a score.
Smashes, where you break barriers to find short cuts.
Billboards, where you find and smash billboards.
Super Jumps, where you find barreled off ramps, and bust through to jump.
No matter what your mood, there is something you can do to satisfy your itch. The options are great, and nothing feels like work, but is always fun.
Sound: Again, awesome. The vehicle engine sounds are great. The soundtrack is the best I ever heard in a driving game, except the Criterion compositions. They have real songs from real artists, and some classical compositions that I love driving to. I usually turn the music off on driving games, but not this one.
Controls: Spot on.
Replay Value: Very, very high.
My only criticism is that they advertise for downloadable content on the PC, but the store is closed, and so it is just a tease. The things they advertise seem to be just novelties, and would really not add to the game. But what is in the game is, IMO perfection.
Some games I played recently will show slow motion action cams to plop you back into the game only to crash unavoidably. This never happens with the action cams on this game. Superb work on this one EA and Criterion.
Also, my rig is moderate by todays standards, but runs this game smoothly at a very good frame rate.
I have a duel core 3 Gigahertz processor, with a Nvidea 8800 GTX graphics card.
You can drive through the whole city with no loading time once you start.
Impressive. Most impressive Criterion.
Summery, out of all driving games, both Sim and Arcade, this one is my all time favorite.