Summary
Intense, Rewarding and Fast Gameplay.
The Good
With tons of unlockables, mostly involving newer and faster cars, this game packs quite a long play time. I've had it for nearly five months now and I am just nearing the end. The gameplay works extremely well, wherein it rewards you for driving recklessly, giving you boosts for drifting around corners, going dangerously close to cars and driving against oncoming traffic. Furthermore, when using the boosts, if you fully empty your boost meter, you gain half and sometimes all the boost energy back. Conclusion, you'll be one reckless piece of work when driving in this game or you're going to lose. As mentioned before there's a wealth of cars to be unlocked, and they're balanced quite nicely. Sure you'll be going fast as hell on some of the later cars, but the less speedy cars have the benefit of making most turns better. But in the end, when you get good enough at drifting, steering won't be a problem even when using the fastest car available. There're enough modes to race in, and there's also a Crash mode where your objective is to do as much damage as possible when crashing into a road intersection or highway.
The Bad
The Gamecube version suffers slight frame-rate problems when playing in multiplayer. Also, four-player multiplayer would've been neat, but I can't see the Gamecube handling the framerate then, either. There are a couple of minor issues, also, with placement after a crash in a race. In a very few cases it puts me in a very awkward spot where you're either stuck between two civilian cars and crash immediately or you start off facing a wall and it takes a while to get your direction and drive off to a slow start. Personally, I'd like to see some minor damage to the car when you don't crash hard enough to stop the car, cause it's quite awkward when you collide with a car and just nudge off it without a scratch.
The Bottom Line
Despite a couple of minor issues and personal preferences, Burnout 2 is a stellar game with fast and furious (Ugh, it took a lot of psychological strength to say those two words in the same sentance) gameplay and a lot of playtime if you like unlocking things.
