After playing Driven to the point that I was sick of it (see my impressions and upcoming review), it’s kind of funny that the very next game I pick up is another racer. However, unlike Driven, Burnout has proven to be a great game that overachieves in many of the areas that Driven fell short.

Burnout has a lot going for it. The stand-out feature that everyone is talking about is the crash physics. In most racers, the car will bounce off of other cars or perhaps flip through the air or veer sideways, but the car usually stays in pretty good shape. There have been some attempts at creating the impact and damage a crash at 100 MPH would have, but Burnout is the best I’ve seen yet. You can feel the impact as bumpers dent, glass shatters, and cars either tumble or stop dead in their tracks. The wrecks vary depending on the relative size of each car, their velocities and the angle of impact. This results in an awe-inducing mangle of flying glass and metal that will have you shouting both out of anger and delight.

But guess what? You aren’t supposed to crash. The premise of Burnout is to drive as dangerously as possible without hitting the other cars on the road – and there are a lot of other cars. I’d wager that there are probably about a dozen cars on the road at a time. You have to deal with cars changing lanes, turning corners, and braking at stop lights. You will curse red lights and cross-traffic. When a bus comes from the left and a taxi comes from the right, you’ll either scream because you couldn’t avoid it or shout because you just missed them and you have no clue how.

As you barrel through the packed streets, your boost meter will fill slowly as you have near misses with other vehicles; perform drifts; and drive through oncoming traffic. If you fill the meter, you’ll be able to get a nice long speed boost. If you wreck at any point, the meter will drop dramatically.

All of the cars seem well-balanced, each having their own strengths and weaknesses. The supermini is easy to handle, but doesn’t have much speed. The tow truck has terrible acceleration, but is tough to crash. What I find really interesting is that my roommate will only use the muscle car, but I can’t stand it. I’m impressed that we can have such differing opinions because it shows that the cars are suited for different driving styles and there isn’t any “best car” that everyone will be fighting over.

So far, there seems to be a healthy selection of tracks, based both on European and American locales. Races take place on freeways, in heavy traffic, in rural areas, and there are even a few places where you kick up the dust and go off-road. There are also a few “marathon” tracks that intertwine several of the other stages and create a huge course that takes more than four minutes to complete.

Graphically, I’m very impressed. As I mentioned before, the wrecks look great with particles of glass flying everywhere. The cars are nicely detailed, sporting fully modeled rims and some decent reflection effects. It’s clear that a lot of care has been taken with the track backgrounds as well. You can see other portions of the track far in the distance, and the landscape is littered with well fleshed-out trees – not 2-D sprites!

Burnout has been a blast so far, and I’m eager to get back to it and unlock everything. It’s the first great car racing game for the GameCube, so do yourself a favor and at least give it a rent.