I never played the multiplayer barring some split screen with my brother so I won't talk about it much but I highly recommend finding someone and playing a few races with them. This is a matter of taste but I much prefer linear racing games that focus on the actual RACES over driving around a boring hub world. This also came out just before racing games started obsessing over open worlds. The courses look fantastic and take you through beaches, forests, mountains and cities. Learning courses inside out is rewarding and knowing exactly which lines to take when you're boosting around is the most satisfying feeling ever. Also, restarting an event takes you to a loading screen, then to the race start menu, then there's a three second countdown, THEN you get to retry. The crashes look fantastic and Criterion pushed this heavily in advertisements for the game, but it boils down to luck a lot of the time. Oh and you're driving a Formula 1 car, which means so much as grazing a pavement will make you spin out.

You will be expected to never take your finger off the boost button to get gold in these races, and some of the latter events require you to boost for 3 minutes straight, around cars and obstacles, hitting every turn absolutely perfectly, and a single crash will ruin your chances of getting gold. Burning Lap/Special Events are races aimed at veterans of the game. Having events dedicated to wiping out every racer you see is about as mindlessly fun as this game gets. The takedowns in Burnout look incredible and Road Rage makes the most of this. The three most interesting ones are Road Rage, Burning Lap/Special Event and Crash. You'll compete in standard races, road rage events (take out as many opposition cars in the given time limit), eliminator races (every lap the racer in last place gets eliminated until it's a 1v1 race to the finish), Face Off races (a 1v1 race where you win your opponents car if you best them) Grand Prix tournaments (4 races in a row and the best racer overall wins), Burning Lap/Special Event races (complete a lap as quick as possible in a specific car) and Crash events (cause as much damage as possible). The amount of variety is absolutely insane. This sees you complete different types of race/event in three separate parts of the world: US, Asia and Europe.

This game is as close to perfect as an arcade racer can be.

Burnout 3 takedown preview lap