What should have been an outrageously fun racer turns out to be flawed and frustrating.
First of all, the game looks great. The sense of speed is there. The tracks are varied and interesting, even though some tracks share portions with each other. And the explosions are spectacular, especially the level 2 power plays and the route changers. You get several modes of play, such as a single-player season or quick play, and multi-player public, private and party games. Plus there are various events like races, elimination, survival, detonator, and air strike/air revenge.
However, once you start playing for a while, you'll see where corners were cut and flaws in the game make it a very frustrating experience.
The single-player game pits you against AI opponents who don't play by the rules. As the season progresses, you'll find yourself in races that are nearly impossible to win. The AI doesn't use power plays against each other, only you. And the "rubber band" effect is one of the worst I've ever seen. Opponents with cars that have worse stats than yours will leap past you with ease, often on the last corner of the race when it's too late to take them down with a power play.
These issues can be somewhat remedied by playing in quick play mode. Here you're able to adjust the difficulty on races, but not on survival or air strike modes. But you are unable to collect most achievements unless you play through the season.
With a frustrating single-player game, you'd think you can escape to multi-player mode where there is no cheating AI. Well, the only problem here is the lack of structuring of who you play against. You unlock the faster and better cars by progressing though the single-player season. So unless you have finished the single-player game, you'll be constantly thumped by those who have! Out of the box, you'll have the slowest car. If you joined a multi-player game on your first day, you'd be pitted against much faster cars and stand no chance instead of being grouped with other players at the same level as you.
The multi-player unbalance can be corrected if you BUY the DLC that unlocks all cars. But why should you have to pay to be competitive when you've already paid just to get the game? Alternately you can set up private or XBOX Live party games where you can agree between friends which cars to use, but I didn't have friends with Split Second to be able to do that.
In the end, Split Second winds up being a frustrating game due to the difficulty of winning races against cheating AI, and the wildly unbalanced multi-player games. If Black Rock had spent a little more time making a challenging AI instead of a cheating AI, and a little effort in better multi-player match-making, this would have been one of my favorite arcade racers ever. Well, the end of season mode hints at a sequel. Let's hope they get it right the second time around.