by: John Olin

March 12, 2006

The World Tour while not entirely difficult to complete should last you a good fifteen to twenty hours of play time if you want to get all the points possible as well as all the gold medals. You also aren't restricted from the more advanced tours for much time, as by the time you are completing Tour Four you have already unlocked up to Tour Eight. Eventually, the tracks do seem to run their course, and you end up back in tracks you have done before, but they are now more difficult and might have special catches to them. Even though it can get repetitive, you find yourself not able to turn away from the single-player, as it is also great practice for getting used to what is online.

The developers have mixed it up a bit with the Xbox 360 version of the game, giving you different variations in tracks, a few what seem to be new tracks, and the visual overall definitely help[s to increase the variety. You also seem to have different crash modes in which you can participate, at least ten different ones that I know of so far. You will find a few new cars also, such as the specially created Xbox 360 car. There is also an Eliminator match during World Tour, which systematically destroys whatever car is in last place every few seconds. There are other variations of racing, such as taking out as many cars as possible, but the AI in the game will also be trying to take you out, and in many cases it does a fantastic job of messing with you. Still, you can’t help but feel the AI is a bit to dumb in some instances, but it is definitely rewarding either way.

Glitches that seemed to be in the Xbox version of the game all seem to be gone, but now you have a few new glitches. One such glitch seems to make opponents or even traffic in Crash mode a bit dumber. Another occurs after getting through a challenge or race, the stars, and the tally up can actually slow down in some rare instances, which is sort of funny seeing most of the game keeps up. Only at certain spots will you see slowdown and even that is very minimal. Load times are still to be found, nearly every time you start a race, and they are definitely better than they were on the Xbox version, but it still seems to hamper the energy of the game. That fifteen seconds of silence doesn't help keep you want to play the game anymore, although the wait is normally well worth it. Other than that, despite the games somewhat lenient take on physics and what you are doing when you take down an opponent, it is fine.

Crash mode is definitely one of my favorite parts of the game because that is all you do, is crash. In many ways it is like going to a Casino and betting money because you never know exactly if you are going to hit big money, even if you hit that precise spot that you know you need to hit to get the big cash. To even begin you normally need to pick a car that is pretty heavy, and hopefully the fastest. It all depends on your conditions however and if there are ramps where lighter cars may be critical. Disappointingly, they took away some of the challenge in crash mode, which before there was a gauge that let you know the best time to start, now the game automatically sets it up for you. When you hit the vehicles, eventually enough will pile up so that your crash-breaker is built up; when that is built up, you rapidly press B. What follows is a thermal nuclear like explosion, where everything goes into slow-mo, barrels, cars, wheels, crates, and everything else go off in many different directions and you have better change of hitting things. Then because of that, more cars will crash, and you cover more lanes. Sometimes you will be on a bridge and get a crash-breaker, so when you do you can actually direct your totaled car inch by inch, off the bridge and into more traffic. It actually has a lot more strategy than it would seem. The most ingenious thing about the crash modes is, using the paths with many variations, traffic coming at you head-on, and traffic going the same direction you can actually have to hunt people down and destroy them in many cases. I had perfect boost with my truck at the starting line, went off a ramp with tens of thousands of feet below me, the air whistling by, and then after flying for hundreds of feet a crash onto the other side of the mountain totaling dozens of cars below. There is another crash mode, which you can have two players up against each other, but the problem with this one is that even though you may hit some cars, the other person could hit one car at the exact same time but get far more. So it isn’t as much of a game of skill, as it is a great game of chance when doing this one.