It seems that Criterion had a powerful campaign to make it clear that there is no better Burnout than Burnout Paradise, even if this could be a Need for Speed.
I'll start from the good stuff, Butterflies and Hurricanes is a good song to introduce the map and the game, although I would like it in many better contexts. The game, more than a racing game, is a car platformer, under this approach the game is fun and tolerable considering that in 2012 Forza Horizon would arrive to show us the true direction of arcade racing games (my personal dream is a Forza Horizon where street racing has chases).
The mechanical model of the main races being easy to unlock, but each car having its own 5 races is excellent, especially since NFS was never known for having a large palette of vehicles, so it's creating content where there is little, the problem is that the map is so little varied that in the end the races are repetitive, and that many cars share races, so the repetitiveness gets tiring.
Now for the bad (I did my best to show the good), Fairhaven City has no identity, it seems that after Rockport City (the city of the real Most Wanted) there are no more genuinely good cities, RC has three zones, distinguishable from each other, a quiet area, a bay, an industrial estate and the city itself, you look at the signs and they say "Rosewood on the left" and you know all the utilities of those roads. Fairhaven all areas are equally useless, wrong, the highway is even more useless.
The chases go from cool in the beginning since the cops are just as deranged as the player, but as the game progresses they become boring because as the police show their potential from the beginning, the rest of the game is uneventful, but the good thing is that the game knows that the chases are boring because... ahaha... getting arrested has no penalty, the game is more fun letting you get arrested, what a mess.
In short, the game is bad, better is any of the Forza Horizon, or Black Box's Need for Speed (Underground, Most Wanted, Carbon, Undercover), but if you want a good Criterion game, there's Burnout Paradise.
I'll start from the good stuff, Butterflies and Hurricanes is a good song to introduce the map and the game, although I would like it in many better contexts. The game, more than a racing game, is a car platformer, under this approach the game is fun and tolerable considering that in 2012 Forza Horizon would arrive to show us the true direction of arcade racing games (my personal dream is a Forza Horizon where street racing has chases).
The mechanical model of the main races being easy to unlock, but each car having its own 5 races is excellent, especially since NFS was never known for having a large palette of vehicles, so it's creating content where there is little, the problem is that the map is so little varied that in the end the races are repetitive, and that many cars share races, so the repetitiveness gets tiring.
Now for the bad (I did my best to show the good), Fairhaven City has no identity, it seems that after Rockport City (the city of the real Most Wanted) there are no more genuinely good cities, RC has three zones, distinguishable from each other, a quiet area, a bay, an industrial estate and the city itself, you look at the signs and they say "Rosewood on the left" and you know all the utilities of those roads. Fairhaven all areas are equally useless, wrong, the highway is even more useless.
The chases go from cool in the beginning since the cops are just as deranged as the player, but as the game progresses they become boring because as the police show their potential from the beginning, the rest of the game is uneventful, but the good thing is that the game knows that the chases are boring because... ahaha... getting arrested has no penalty, the game is more fun letting you get arrested, what a mess.
In short, the game is bad, better is any of the Forza Horizon, or Black Box's Need for Speed (Underground, Most Wanted, Carbon, Undercover), but if you want a good Criterion game, there's Burnout Paradise.