Now, that's more like it. I knew you had it in you, Burnout.

Burnout 2 is arguably what Burnout 1 should've been, while the real Burnout 1 would have been better off being some cursed, unreleased tech demo that the world would be better off without having experienced. With that in mind, Criterion put significantly more focus on what they wanted this game to be this time around, and packed it to the brim with far more content than it's predecessor.

Everything that's part of the main game is neatly laid out in the championship menu, but racing tournaments aren't the only thing that's part of it - Face Offs return as the main way to unlock fancy new cars, and they're visibly part of the main gameplay loop and not hidden away in the bonus menu of all things, like last time. A new addition is Pursuits, where you unlock some more cars by becoming a cop and taking them down...more on this mode later. There's a fair few hours of content in this mode, and once you reach the end and hit the credits there's a whole post-game tournament too with even more new cars and reversed tracks, so it's way more value for money than the paltry handful of tournaments the original game offered.

The tracks themselves are also a lot more enjoyable: there are a lot more boost-friendly freeways to blaze down, traffic isn't nearly as much of a minefield, and the drifting corners feel great to well, drift down. The game is much more rewarding of dangerous driving, with boost being easier to achieve and safer to do, while allowing you to keep chaining burnouts (using all your boost in one go) indefinitely if you can keep driving recklessly without crashing. It's truly the ultimate in arcade racing experience, right down to the rather weightless controls. Cars handle very unrealistically in favour of driving with uncanny precision to emulate the ridiculous sorts of driving tricks you see in the movies.

Nowhere is the love for driving-heavy movies more apparent than the crashes. Rather than the ordinary, skidding-out-of-control crashes the likes of which were in Burnout 1, 2's crash physics have been let off the leash, resulting in spectacular collisions that leave cars spinning crazily in mid air and falling to pieces. It's visceral carnage in car form, and it makes crashing mid-race a little less bruising - especially if your opponents immediately crash into your handiwork. The crashing was so hyped up that Criterion made a seperate bonus "Crash" mode, with 30 stages to try and reach a target amount of damage value in set scenarios. Unfortunately, I'm not too big a fan of this approach; I'd have rather had a small handful of well designed playgrounds than a large amount of these puzzles that play more like a very lethal game of pachinko, where you need to know to crash into the right car at the right time...or, glitch a bus into a wall, that always works.

The races are good, the car selection is brilliant (though some form of customisation would've been a nice feature), the Face Offs are a cool idea to unlock cars, and it's all generally lovely...and then.
Pursuit mode is just not very good. You'd expect it to be great, in a game about car crashing as much as it's about racing, the idea of ramming opponents off the road sounds perfect. Unfortunately, the actual gameplay can be summarised as "get murdered by traffic while you lightly make contact with the rear end of a completely unstoppable force, then repeat that 10 times within the time limit". The opponent car cannot be rammed or otherwise badly hit in any way, you just simply make light contact repeatedly to drain their health. If you get in front of them, or try to otherwise ram them off the road, you will get violently shoved out of the way by their sheer aura. In fact, the same is true of the opponent AI in this game: they're far better drivers than in 1, which is good, but they also cannot be pushed into oncoming traffic like in 1, which was like, the one fun thing in that game. Fortunately most of Burnout 2 is fun to compensate, but this seems like a weird oversight.

All in all, it's a fine game and significantly better than 1. The music is a little less memorable than 1, but far less goofy and the way in which more layers of the music kick in when you boost is a very nice touch. There's a lot to do, and it's actually pretty fun to do it; however, pursuit mode is a big let down, crash mode could be better, and there are still some notable bugs in the driving and crash sensitivity. Still, solid game. Cannot wait to see how 3 stacks up to it.