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There's a city (Paradise). You have a car (or motorcycle). You drive. You race. You crash (a lot).
Yeah, so there's not much of a story for this game. But, really, in a racing game, who pays attention to the story? Unlike Need for Speed and other tales-of-racing titles, this is all about you and your vehicle. And crashes. Can't forget the crashes.
The game does love showing off its physics model. As typical for the Burnout games, every time there's anything more than a fender-bender, the action zooms in on the vehicle in question to show how sublime such a crash would be. Pieces of metal fly off in various directions, sparks erupt from the slightest collision, and, if you're really good, you'll even see a car or two do a couple of flips before it hits the ground.
It looks great. It can be a little distracting in the middle of a race for your life. Say, if you're in third place, and you successfully crunch the second-place holder, you could lose out on first place because the jump-cut to the wreck disrupted your flow. So now you've got to realize that you're back in control, and your car has not (contrary to initial expectations) continued along without you, and you have to make sure that you aren't the next wreck that the cameras will focus on.
Not that it's terribly hard to win the races. If you know the city layout reasonably well, you can take some shortcuts while the rest of the cars are sticking to the regular path. If anything, the game seems to encourage this, giving you extra points for finding shortcuts (even if it's just sliding down a cliff face) or for making impossible jumps (something that the franchise lives off of). The race is, if anything, just a setpiece. What you do in that race is up to you.
Everything that isn't a race isn't nearly as freeform, and it's harder to reach a certain score threshold. The wreck-races (where your goal is to flatten cars, not place first) can be a little hard to adjust to, especially if you've been doing straight races the whole time. The other drivers can also be frustratingly stable, and can't be baited into doing stupid moves. They can be forced off the road or into pylons, but your reflexes have to be quick, and usually it has to be done on the spur of the moment, since the car will peel off if it detects an oncoming collision.
But challenging is good. I just wish there was a setting for it, so I could dial it up a little bit for the races, and dial it down a little bit for everything else.The motorcycle races seem like a hastily-added feature, as races are all they can do. Sure, there are also the jumps and shortcuts you can find all over the city, but races are the only actual events. I suppose it's a lot harder to do the wrecks for motorcycles in ways that don't show body parts fly all over the place. No, seriously. Talk to some motorcyclists that have been in high-speed wrecks ... oh, wait, you can't. They're all dead. And dismembered. Not necessarily in that order.
There's a money system so you can buy new vehicles or give your existing ones a new paintjob. More interestingly, any car you knock out of first place in one of the events you can win, and use in other events. So that's a neat system. I'm not sure the actual monetary winnings are really a useful mechanic, but it does at least provide a handwave as to why you can't have everything right off the bat.
A fun racing game in a quasi-realistic setting. No one would ever say it was a successor to F-Zero or anything, but if you want a game where you can drive and cause really spectacular wrecks, this is a good one to pick up and play for a couple of hours.