I always feel insane for how much more I seem to like this compared to other people. The driving has incredible momentum behind it, it feels great and visceral! I love the way you progress each car individually with races to unlock part upgrades, it gives great incentive to play different cars rather than sticking to your best one. The open world is fun to explore with just enough going on compared to the size of it all. The multiplayer aspects were really great if you had some friends also playing it.

It's a bit stuck in the 7th gen aesthetic but I'd argue it creates a bit of a personality for itself between the soundtrack, the surreal cop chase intros, and decent environment design. It's not really out of the ordinary for a racing game like this to be a bit visually bland, I would say it's a problem for a lot of the genre and anything that escapes that really stands out.

I like this better than Burnout Paradise! Better soundtrack, better selection of event types, has cop chases. If this had been marketed as a Burnout game instead of having it bizarrely named after an existing NFS game I'm convinced it would've been much better received.