Ok, i figured i would throw my 2 cents in on this game and see how everyone feels about it.
First off i would like to say that this is one of the best racers i have ever played. Sure it does have a few HUGE annoyances, but they are easily overlooked in the grand scale of things.
Visually this game is a huge leap above its "step-brother" Midnight Club. All the colors are vibrant, the city has got a great ammount of detail to it, the cars look absolutely awsome and the lighting affects are just spectacular. The best part about the looks of the game is being able to see the other cars in your car and vice versa in real time. The only major visual problem i had with the game is that it was a little to well done. When trying to customize my car i would have to repeatedly play around with the camera angle to try to get a non-glared view of what i was looking at if i was trying to look at some specific detail. Other than that the game really has no other visual dowfalls.
Story wise this game has nothing to offer. It has something that would resemble a story, but it only serves as a small staple to give the game some sort of continuity. Unfortunetly the "story" gives the player no motivation to finish the game. Truthfully i actually forgot the game had a story many times while trying to complete it the first time through.
Where the game lacks in story it throughly makes up in other features, such customization. This is the games main selling feature. Just about anything you can think of can be remade on your car (Rims, Exhaust Tips, Tint, Decals, Side Skirts, Bumpers, Ect.) Just customizeing your car alone can take up a great deal of time. The best part of the customization is that the game doesn't offer a cookie cutter color scheme and some crappy generic decals. The player has a wide variety of everything to choose from, so no two cars can look alike.
The two biggest gripes i have about how the game are the way the AI is set up, and the physics of the game. Those two elements make everyrace very unfair. The AI can take a 90 degree turn at 100+ where as the player go crashing into the wall and do 500 flips before they hit the ground and come to a dead stop BACKWARDS. That is the second gripe i have about the game. Whenever you land from a flip or crash into anything the car always ends up facing BACKWARDS!!
All together I would give this game a 7.5 or an 8.0. The game has the potentail to be a 10, but because of the small things like the A.I., a little background clipping, and the car springboarding into the air at every little jolt the 10 factor is a far cry. <