Even today, in 2005, it is one of my top 5 games of all time.
If you look at someone playing this game without knowing anything about it, you might think it's a horrible game. But when looking closer you see how much humour and fun there is in it, from the totally funny mission descriptions to the story to the hilarious powerups("Nuclear bomb", "Kangaroo on command", "Bouncy bouncy"...).
The physics are great, adapted for every object. Splatting pedestrians is even more fun than earlier, as they hang on your hood or fly through the air. One of the best things in the game might be the cars' abilities to break and shatter in a virtually endless amount of ways. The cars will most likely land or turn over on their wheels at the end of a stunt, and it looks extremely realistic.
Unlike other car games, you can go whereever you want and do whatever you want. (But if you somehow get over the huge walls between the "worlds you get teleported back, of course.)
In the races you will earn money for doing almost everything you wouldn't do in real life, and afterwards you can either buy new cars or upgrade them.
There are multiple ways of winning the races. I will come back to this later. But I'm not going through every single aspect of the game though.
The graphics are absolutely good enough, as always they used the graphical style which fit best with the currently available technology. You won't find much annoying in this category. The post-apocalyptic landscapes look great, the car designs are brilliant, and everything else is cool enough too. It all works.
In the game, the sound is good enough. Although the amount of crashing sounds is limited, they are all great and come when they fit. One thing I think is rather negative is the voices of your opponents. They often say strange things when being crashed into, or when crashing into you. That's okay, but they get repetitive.
Every other aspect of the sound is nice. Nothing is annoying.
The music is simply perfect for the game. I can't imagine the game with anything else.
Even after completing it, driving around in free play mode is plainly great fun! You have loads of different cars, from dragsters to huge mine trucks, and huge environments where you can always use one of your crazy powerups to go somewhere where no other car has been.
There is also a multiplayer mode where players can crash eachother and a number of other things. Great replay value.
You win a race by either killing all the people on the map(extremely time demanding and hard), wasting all opponents, or racing through the laps.
When you do very much morally wrong(and you will), the cops will come for you. And at some point the "Suppressors" arrive. Apart from the time limit, they are the greatest threats.
Every second mission is an actual mission though, where the rules previously mentioned do not count. Here you must do certain things within time limits. This can be frustrating if your car(or yourself) isn't good enough. Both can be fixed by going back and racing a few regular tracks. A game must be hard in some way.
Many say that the downside with the gameplay is the time limit. You have to crush, kill, destroy or race in order to keep the remaining time high.
But it's got to be there, as it the game would be much easier and less adrenaline filled without it.
You can always turn it off in free play mode though.