The driving part of GTA well done.
Graphics wise this is a well detailed game. You can read (albeit dangerous) the license plates on other cars. The lighting from the sun shines off high gloss paint jobs like in real life. The small detail damages are realistic; if you broke a headlamp it stays broken and doesn’t light up. The back ground is realistic enough to tell distance. I’ve played this at both regular television and hi definition 1080p while it is still good at the lowest setting I highly recommend the playing at the highest possible detail.
Sound and Music. You can tell from just driving around what types of cars are around you with even having to look at that area. The screeching of the tires to the roar of an engine is clear with any vehicle you use. Now the music, quantity or quality wise you will not be disappointed. There are a lot of songs that play while driving around so chances are if you play for an hour or two, you will not hear the same song twice. And you don’t like a particular song you can always take if off the play list. One should note that a good portion of songs are the same songs from older Burnout Games.
Now Game play.
As you win events you upgrade your license. The higher the license, the larger amount of vehicles you will be able to use. These events are littered all thought Paradise City. To start the event simple pull up to a light to start it.
Here is the events.
Races: Standard Race. From one to seven other opponents you drive to a specific end point.
Road Rage: Timed Event. You use your vehicle as a battering ram to smash other vehicles into traffic, walls or other hard objects. Target amount is usually displayed. Event ends when either you take to much damage or time ends.
Marked Man: Almost like a race. You goal is to reach one destination while four other computer cars try to inflict enough damage to keep you from reaching your destination.
Stunts: Use your vehicle like a little acrobat, jumping off ramps, crashing bill boards and doing spins. The more you do in a sequence the more points you get. There is a target score to get per event.
Burning Route: One route per vehicle. It’s a timed race where you just have to get to the finish line by a certain time using a certain vehicle. Every route you finish unlocks a upgraded version of the vehicle used.
All these events get a bit more difficult as the game wears on but not that much more. I would say once you get used to the way the game plays you find that most of these events range from easy (one or two attempts) to medium (fifteen minutes maximum).
Now there are a few side events or tasks that are fun to do. Running certain billboards, barriers, and super jumps. They are littered everywhere, cant be avoided just driving around. There are few hidden but find to fun all of them and as a reward for finding all it unlocks more vehicles. There are also two events per street, one is time trails and the other is showtime. Showtime is just you bouncing around hitting vehicles for points.
Online play is quite fun with tasks and races, connections are usually stable. One thing I like is with Xbox Live Vision take a photo of you when you get taken out by another drive and sent to the aggressor. The online experience is a whole new game in itself and worth playing.
Although it’s a very good game here is a few of the things I didn’t like. Showtime is very repetitive in the sense you have to do it to all 64 streets of Paradise City. Also Showtime replaced Crash from previous games. The on line challenges are very repetitive where if 2 players you have to do it for 7 players. And some of them are very very basic like driving in oncoming traffic. Also while doing online challenges if one person get disconnected, the challenges are cancelled. The difficulty level is somewhat misleading as the more cars you unlock the easier the game is when trying to do the events.
One last thing that kind of surprised me is the amount of advertising in the game, from billboards to vans there is way too much advertising in this game. To show how much advertising there are four unlockable cars, all of them are plastered with the names.
In all this is a great game with lots of driving ahead of you.