Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Too short"

I've been a fan of burnout for a few years now and after seeing the previews for Burnout Paradise; I decided to check out the roots of the series. I have to say I'm very surprised with what I got. I'm also surprised that Criterion Games has turned this into one of the best arcade racing franchises ever.

The game is a pretty standard racing game. You have a one player mode where you play through some form of tournament and you have multiplayer races. All the cars handle nearly the same sans the bigger vehicles (for example, a bus). The only thing keeping this from being a generic racing game is the crashes. When you crash, the game will show your crash in a fixed angle and calculate how much damage you caused (used for records, such as "Worst Drivers" being the drivers who caused the most damage). The only problem is that the crashes get tiresome to watch after so long. So at first you'll be like "Haha! Look at that!", then you'll play five hours and you'll say "Hurry the f**k up!!" when you crash. Beyond that small nuisance the game play is pretty standard, but still fun.

The graphics are solid. Nothing ground-breaking, but still nice. The only problem is that it is sometimes hard to see things that are coming, especially in multiplayer. Sometimes you and your challenger will just be cursing because you hit a blue car that you didn't see until you hit it. The audio is all fine, but forgettable.

The biggest problem with this game is it's value. It has so little content. It has less than 10 cars and tracks. With so little content you can imagine that there's not much really to accomplish. If you really wanted to you could beat this game in one day. If you would really insist on buying this game I would suggest buying it used.

All in all, it's a fun game that is very short lived. I'd suggest renting this game and only buy it if you're a collector or something of that nature.