Let's get one thing straight. This is not a game about crashing.
The storyline isn't fantastic and is usually quite bitty. It never really seems to have a nice flow to it, and at the end of each chapter, it boosts To Be Continued, however the narrative before it is just normal boring tone. It isn't as shocking as, say, Just Cause. However, the story does have some very interesting highlights. It involves you driving a wide variety of cars around either giving chase to criminals, partaking in test drives, or getting to certain checkpoints. You also play as a series of nameless characters in the cars, sometimes even the criminals, however the title of the game is useless, there is very few crashes – because if you crash, your car gets wrecked, and if your car gets wrecked – game over.
Graphically, this game is a letdown. It doesn't look up to standard compared to GTA IV or Paradise; however there are more worries than ever. The map is based on a series of motorways, joined by outer A roads, and that's it. No town centres to storm through, no car parks to park in. The world just seems to be made up of motorways, and after a while, it just gets slightly annoying. There is a lot of cardboard countryside to either side of you, which looks very dated. It's a shame, because, during one of the missions you get to go off road and take 'daredevil stunts', and the sound the crackly rocks and squishing mud is fantastic, but the environment you are driving in isn't.
And this brings me neatly onto another point – the soundtrack. It is actually really quite good, full of suspense and all that, but eventually it will click, at some point during the first case, it's the same track being repeated endlessly. Now I am not German and therefore not a fan of the TV show, however I have a few contacts that realised that the soundtrack is in fact an extended version of the theme tune to the show being repeated endlessly. I could place the bets on the table that the developers could not get licenses for any other song! Again, it's a shame.
The controls are surprisingly receptive. Police cars and other force vehicles are the ones which are the best. Not only do they reach ridiculous speeds of over 220 (the units, for some reason, are never shown in the game), they accept nearly any action presented to them, unlike Pimp My Ride which takes a few hours to notice that you are pressing the accelerate button. On a note of acceleration, all the cars have an atrocious start up, however a few seconds in, and it's a la bang.
Despite its lacklustre graphics, repetive soundtrack, bitty storyline and slow voiceovers, the game someone has an addictive vibe to it. Something so amazing I can't quite work out what. Something thats jus right.