Burnout

The Good
The best version of the first Burnout is this one on the Xbox. 5.1 Dolby Digital sound, progressive scan support, bump mapping on all of the road surfaces, true volumetric shadows on the environment and other vehicles, real-time cubic environment mapping, anti-aliasing, tri-linear filtering and other tech lingo means it looks and sounds the best.

Though its a short ride it is definitely a fun game while it lasts. There's a great sense of speed and weaving through traffic, chaining burnouts really gets the adrenaline pumping. (Note: boost works a little different than in later Burnout titles, here you have to fully fill the boost meter before it can be used. But unlike the second game you don't have to use it all in one go). Controls are tight and responsive, and the frame rate is rock-solid even when there's a lot going on. The crash physics engine is undoubtedly the star of the game and very impressive for the time. Plus after races you can watch all the crashes in slow motion with 360-degree control of a camera and even save them to hard drive.

The Bad
As the Xbox and GameCube ports came out 5 months after the PlayStation 2 original, you'd think Criterion add some extra content and not just improve the graphics. Unfortunately that is not the case. As it stands the game is way too short compared to other racing games released at the time, not to mention its sequels. Complete 6 championships (14 races in total) and 4 Face-off races and that's all there is to do. Sure, you can try and get the record times & scores in all courses but what's the use if it doesn't unlock anything. There's also Time Attack, Free Run and Survival modes. Survival is by far the toughest mode in the whole game where you have to do three laps on a track without crashing once. For all the effort it could have at least unlocked extra paint jobs for the cars or something.

Speaking of cars, there are only 9 vehicles to choose from, including special vehicles like the bus and tow truck. And none of them go over 150 mph (when boosting). The game features 16 courses in total which might sound decent on paper but when you take in consideration that more than half of the tracks are either reverse/different time of day versions or "marathon" tracks (where two or three courses are combined), the actual number of unique tracks is just 6.

Burnout employs a semi rubber band AI, but I personally found the opponent cars unable to put up much of a fight, always crashing in certain scripted spots. As long as you drive without crashing too much you don't even have to boost and you'll still win. Hell, most of the time if you crash a lot it will be the time limit that will be your main nemesis and not the AI. In the sequel Point of Impact the AI was much more competitive without sinking to ridiculously abusive rubber-banding like in Takedown.

Music is rather dull and there's no custom soundtrack support. Another minor gripe is that pushing the left (and right) analog stick sounds the horn. It's not like there's a lack of buttons.

The Bottom Line
The first Burnout is still a fun game but compared to later games in the series this one won't hold your interest for very long because of its limited number of cars, tracks and stuff to do. There's very little reasons to go back to it as the sequels pack way more content and perfected the formula in every way. For a much better introduction to the series check out Burnout 2: Point of Impact (the Developer's Cut for Xbox packs 15 additional crash junctions and 21 new car skins so it's the definitive version).