This game is too ambititous for its own good. The developers forgot one important aspect that every game should have:fun
What you first notice when you start playing the game is that the world isn't really fun to drive in. The environment looks pretty lame and blanc. It all looks the same and often you can't even tell the difference between one place or another. But hey, who cares as long as the "racetracks" are cool and the races are fun....
They also failed in this aspect. The races are really lame. There isn't much of an intense roadbattle (like in motorstorm) you would expect. I found my self losing track of the CPU at the beginning of a race a lot of times. When you finally get to the finish you get to see in what place you ended. well... ok if you say so. Because you lose track of the CPU's it almost feels like your not even in a race at some times. There is just to little competitional feeling to it.
Also the vehicles feel really slow. When your driving 90miles/hour on a sandy mountain you expect a feeling like: oh my god i'm gonna die!!". But instead it feels like an average boring sunday ride with your grandpa.
One other thing that was really annoying to me are the loading screens and the button configuration in the pausescreen. During the game you will spend a reasonable amount of time in the pause screen to transport to races, buy new vehicles or to adjust the appearance of your driver. The button config in these menus and the lay-out are really confusing. I found myself often just pushing random buttons to get what I want and often this results in a random loading screen...(WTF?!).
Isn't there anything good about this game? you ask me. uhm...it's huge... and... it looks pretty allright for such a huge game but that's about it.
I wish codemasters wasn't so ambitious to create a huge world. Instead they should have focussed more on the feeling of the vehicles and finetuning the game in a much smaller world with more exciting places to visit.
If you feel like playing a fantastic open world racinggame I suggest you stay away from this and play BO;Paradise for instant. My main feeling about this game can be summed up in just one word: disappointment.....
Rikes01