Burnout 2 is on of the best looking racing games you'll ever see, and is the best looking on GCN. Every track looks great, and there is so much detail in each course. From the most igsignificant STOP sign to a Jet Liner fly over head in the Airport stage. The tracks are all filled with these little details that make each stage look that much more authentic. These include a "Specular Bloom" which makes the sun reflect off the pavement and tons of traffic. Then there are the Point-to-Point stages that link 2 or even 3 of the tracks in part in to one long run. You may start in the snowy mountain and end up on a Los Angeles-esc freeway. And it all just works so naturally each one of these runs naturaly flows from one scean to the next, it is actually quite surreal. As in the first Burnout, you get 60frames a second(30 in 2P) for blazing speed. The car details in Burnout 2 are much better than the original. Each car sports a higher polygon count for more details and this time they sport realtime reflections (it reflects the road lines and scenery, but not the other cars), they also added smoke to go along with the skidding this time. Now for what makes Burnout and Burnout 2 stand out from the pack, the crashes, this time you'll see sparks fly, clouds of smoke, and hoods, tires, and fenders flying, all for the most spectacular crashes in videogames.

The Controls are exactly the same in B2 as the where in B1, which is just great, because veterens will not have to re-learn any of the controls. In case you care they are Control stick: Steer, A: Accelerate, B: Brake, L: Horn, R: Boost, C-Stick: Analog braking/accelerator and the Control Pad adjust your veiw from 3rd to 1st person. Now the gameplay is almost the same as well, except for a few interesting new twists, which I'll get to in a minute. When you first start the game you have to complete what is called Offensive Driving 101, this teaches rookies how drive Burnout style. Once that is completed(it's not hard, and you can unlock your first secret car, but getting all gold medals), you access to all the other modes. The main mode is called Championship and you must complete a series of races to advance, if you get all golds you unlock a P-t-P race, and if you win that you'll unlock you first Pursuit race, in which you are the police and have to chase down a target car and basically touch it 10 times. You will also come across a few races called Face-off here if can beat the other car you'll get to keep it. And it goes on like that until you reach the end of Championship. Unlike B1 though there is another harder Championship, called the Custom Champoinship, where you race custom modified cars. This mode can be very challenging.

Other modes include Single race, where you race a single race on one track, there are 15 main track and those 15 can be run in reverse, making 30 tracks to master (and trust me each track is different in reverse), Time Attack, where you try to beat some fast laps. There are Pursuit (unlocked when you finish all 3 pursuits in Championship), where you can pick any car to be and any car to chase. And a mode called Crash, where you do just that crash. You're usally set up on top of a hill or a long streach of road and you try to slam in to other cars that are set up and create as much damage as possible. It is one of the games most fun modes, I fell in love with it when I created a crash where a bus did a back flip! There are 30 crash junctions in the GCN and Xbox version, PS2 owners have 15. You can also do single race, pursuit and crash in 2 player mode, you can even have 4 players take turns in the crash mode.

Now for the new twists to the actual racing gameplay. First the Boosts themselves, have been adjusted to allow you to link them together by collecting more boost underneath the boost you already have going, and you can chain as many of these as you like together (Personally I've gotten 12, but I've read people have linked 20+ together!). And collecting boost is been inhanced too, now you can get more boost by chaining near misses together and by jumping your car. The boost are still as exilerating as ever, but do lose a little effect when you are constantly boosting. And when you're boosting it adds a motion blur effect to the graphics and makes them look at little blurry, the same thing hurts the replay as well it really isn't nessicary and just kind of ruins the replay view, but that is just a lit nit-pick.

The other thing that hurts the gameplay is the CPU racers and their Catch-up logic, no matter how well you race, they are always behind you, it does keep the racing competitive, but is annoying when you have a last lap crash, after linking a bunch of Burnouts together and the watching as the CPU wins the race. The problem isn't so much in the single race mode, but the Custom championship, where if you want to get all gold(all 1st's) then you'll have to drive nothing but perfect races (no crashes), it's not easy, so you'll find yourself reseting the system, if you aren't winning the race. The good thing is the game saves after every race, so when the game loads up again(B2 has great loading times, BTW), you continue from the race you lost. And the wierd thing is that they added points to the Championship modes so that you wouldn't have finish first everytime, but there is no point to not finishing first, because you don't unlock anything if you don't win anyway. This is the worst aspect of B2's championship mode.

The music in Burnout 2 won't win any awards, but it does it's job. It is a mix of classic rock, mixed with a hint of techno. You don't really hear it that much, because when you are just racing it plays softly in the background, but when you activate your boost, it becomes louder, and really does a good job of pumping you up when you are boosting. The sound effects are good as well from engine sounds to the screeching of tires around corners. And the Crashing sounds will make you cringe with pain as you watch the horrible wreak unfold.

You'll fall in love with Burnout 2 when you experence some of the things that can happen in the game. You'll Sigh with relief as you blast passed the leaders crash and bang his mangled hood or fender aside. Or shake your head as you try to squeeze through a intersection only to hit a bus and take out all other racers in crash straght out of the greatest car chases in the world. Those are just some of the the things that you could experence in just one race of Burnout 2. If you like the orginal you will be in heaven with B2, if you didn't like original that much, B2 might change your mind as it much more tweeked then the original. It is one of the best sequels I've ever played, because it fixes almost everything that wrong or lacking in the orginal. It also is the best racing game on GCN.

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