I just got my Burnout license and completed about 15 events afterward. The game had been fun up to this point since I didn't have to complete every event to advance, but now that I do, the game has just fallen apart. It's just a colossal mish-mash of fuck-ups. The high-end stunt cars handle like shit, so it's nearly impossible to get 300,000+ on a regular basis unless you're near the south bridge or the airport. Every time I land a jump the car goes into a fish-tailing frenzy and decides it'd be better suited using a wall to stop itself. Or it'll just barely clip a *insert object that really shouldn't affect a car's handling here (fruit fly?)* and decide to reward me with countless flips and flops, rivaling many presidential candidates. (Each and every single one of those flips and flops being watched, by the way, since I can't fucking TURN THE CRASH CAM OFF. I'm willing to bet 3 hours of my total elapsed playtime with this game is just from watching my car wreck.)
The races are also a lot harder now, but not because of a lack of speed with my car or any actual advance in difficulty, but because my fellow racers like to kamikaze their way into oncoming traffic, conveniently angling their demise right into my fucking path. Every. Single. Time. And if they don't wreck traffic into me, the traffic feels its beneficial to themselves to kindly veer into my lane for NO REASON AT ALL. No exaggeration here, a car just fucking drove across the line and into my front bumper for absolutely no apparent reason. Apparently Criterion has reached a new milestone in A.I.--suicidal tendencies.
I could go on with the complaints--obviously the lack of a restart option becomes really frustrating when you reach this point, and the total inability of the "turn signals" to tell you when to turn (you don't really have time to look at the poorly implemented map in the corner when you have both racers AND traffic to worry about), leaving you barreling down the wrong road at 200mph is really, REALLY something that needs to be fixed.
The extra content and all is certainly something that needs to be commended, and it's the reason I bought the game, but I've seen how the complaints about the actual gameplay have gone largely ignored due to nothing more than stubbornness, and that's almost, almost enough to completely cancel out all that Criterion's done right support-wise.
I don't regret having bought the game, it was only $30 and I've gotten plenty of play-time out of it, but I'd like to have enjoyed it thoroughly all the way through and not have to debate before putting the disc in whether or not I want to put up with the frustration that will soon follow.
BTW, I totally get their stance on the restart thing, getting to know the city and all, and up to the Burnout License, it's not an issue. Would it not have been possible to unlock a restart option once you achieve the Burnout license, though? I think that would have worked a lot better since that's when you really could use it. Just a thought.
