You'll find plenty of prettier driving games, but none can match this for gameplay.
Instead let us pay homage to the sheer genius of the gameplay in this, the pure fun you can have with styilshly powersliding your way into an alley, recovering the back end just in time to avoid scratching the paintwork is seemingly endless. Weaving inches from lamp posts and hearing the dispairing, but very satisfying last wail of a siren as the cop being you wraps his front end around the aforementioned lamp post trying to follow you will force a sly grin from most. Should you not quite pull off the cool moves, and clip one or more; walls, posts, cars, pillars etc then at least damage is modelled nicely, though it has no effect on your car's performance, though it often ruins the sly grin. Not that this matters much because now for some reason you can get out of your car and walk, an interesting concept, but totally useless for anything except as a means to get to a new pristine vehicle for you to charge around in.
Sound is good, nice music and plenty of satisfying crunches and smashing glass but all the cars sound roughly the same. There is a nice variety of vehicles to drive and four different cities to explore, which you can do to your heart's content with the freeplay mode.
Level difficulty is a bit erratic and the last level relies a lot on sheer pot luck to complete, but the levels are only half the game with the free roam element letting you cruise the streets as much as you like. One odd thing is that you can only be chased by two police cars at a time, which certainly detracts from the game but its still fun trying to 'shake the tail' and the AI is smart enough to make you work a bit, though will of course be fooled by you inch-perfect 'into-alley-round-the-post-power-slide'. I've had this game for years and it never fails to produce a smile and its driving physics are the best in any driving game yet. The sooner they produce a decent sequel that does it justice the better.