"Burnout 3 wrecks the competition"
The fun starts in Burnout 3 right where it should, the very beginning. While you have to unlock additional cars and tracks, you can play any of the games different modes from the get go. And unlocking new cars and events happens while playing the game normally. When you beat a event, more open up. It never feels like your struggling to unlock the good stuff.
You drive around like normal racers, but you have a burnout (boost) meter that fills when you perform dangerous acts, like driving on the wrong side of the road, or getting close to traffic. When you make another racer crash you not only get a full burnout meter, your meter also gets bigger. When you crash you will lose a section of the meter, and some boost. However, when your car wrecks you can hold boost to cause the game to slow down. In this state you can slightly move your car around. The goal of this is to make your crashed car hit another racer, causing an aftertouch takedown, which keeps you from loosing boost and part of your boost meter.
The graphics aren't anything to write home about, but they are good. The real eye candy lies in the crashes. The biggest thing that differentiates burnout from other racing series is the fact that you can total your car, other racers cars, and any civilian cars that get in the way. The crash physics are extremely good, making every crash a masterpiece of mangled metal.
There are many different event types in Burnout 3. There are traditional race and GP modes. 1-on-1 events where its just you Vs another car. Time trail like laps where you race all by your lonesome. In crash stages you plow your vehicle into a certain area and try to earn a high amount of destruction dollars by totaling other vehicles and getting money bonuses and multiplyers. And lastly there are events where you are not racing the other cars, but have to takedown (crash) a certain amount of them within the time limit given, or before your car takes a certain amount of damage.
The difficulty is not to bad. It scales pretty good from begging to end. The rubber band CPU's (when you are ahead the cpu catches up, almost every time) can get annoying at times, but without that you wouldn't have as many crashes, which is the best part of the game.
There is alot of replay value in the game. With over 100 different events to complete and many many unlockable vehicles you will be busy with this one for awhile. And if that wasn't enough you can play online or multiplayer at home. At home the split screens make it pretty hard to see far infront of your car (due to the insane speeds) so online is better in this regard. But when playing online you loose the slow motion crashes and aftertouch.
The only bad things I can say about the game are about the camera and the soundtrack.
When you go into slo-mo to try aftertouch takedowns the camera is fixed in whatever position it feels like being in. Usually this isn't a good angle to see where the other racers are coming from, so lots of the time you just have to guess where they will be. All they had to do was let you pan the camera and this wouldn't be an issue. The same goes in crash mode. You really need to use the aftertouch in crash mode to get bonuses and because you cant move the camera, you are guessing where they are most of the time. Also you cannot save replays of crashes, and when you do watch them you have to watch them from the same views you already saw.
The soundtrack is a fairly mute point on X-box if you use a custom one. The songs they provide just are not very good to be racing and crashing to. They also make in very inconvenient to use your own tracks. You cannot combine any tracks already in the game, or take tracks from different playlists on your X-box. Also the tracks they put in the game you can only change from play in race, play in menu, play in both. So you cant turn any of them off completely. And if you use your own tracks you have none of those options. The good news is during races you can press the black button to go to the next track.
All in all Burnout 3: Takedown is a great racing game that lets you do what you wanted to do in those other races, wreck the cars. While I talked in detail about the problems they really only keep this game from being perfect. But near-perfect is something you shouldn't miss. This will be the most fun you have had with a racing game.