Graphics/Sound 10
The graphics are amazing. The cars are beautiful and lifelike. The scenery is gorgeous and it has somewhat real time weather effects in the 24 hours of Le Mans races where each hour actually passes in 1 minute, making it the 24 minutes of Le Mans. Still, it's cool to see the sun set and rise. The attention to detail put into the design of the cars is great. The interiors of the cars are amazingly detailed as well. The tachometer, speedometer, and boost gauge, etc... move in real time in relation to your speed. The interiors are incredibly detailed, down to the color of the instrument panels and gauges when your headlights are on. The sounds that the cars make are pretty convincing and with surround sound speakers, you'd swear that a Shelby GT just flew past you. The raspy exhausts from the Nissan Sylvia's sound just like those blasted kids with 240's and coffee cans next door.
Gameplay 10
Like I said, the title screen music is great and it plays until you race. You get to choose a name for yourself and a country of origin. One very cool thing about this game is that you can choose a name to be called by and the people in the game call you by your name verbally. Every time I cut on the game and it starts up, the nice lady in the game says to me "Hello Daniel, your car is ready and waiting." I love it! The menus are pretty neat to navigate through as well. The types of races are diverse and all are pretty fun. There's circuit racing, touge, drift, rally, etc... My favorite so far is drifting which is waaaayyyy better than in the Need for Speed games. The coolest in game feature has to be the helmet view. You actually sit in the cockpit of the car and you can watch as the driver shifts each gear for upshifts and downshifts and steers the car. You can make the driver look to his left or right to see the cars on either side of you. There are other views of course, but this one is the best. Gran Turismo 5 has the same view, but I love the way it is used in this game. It's more realistic than Gran Turismo in the sense that if you crash your car, you will destroy it, and every bit of damage adds up. There's no running head on into a car and then bouncing back and going your merry way. If you crash too many times, it gets to the point that your car won't steer left or right anymore. You get a real sense of speed when you're going 200+mph in the super cars. Understeer and oversteer are accurately portrayed especially when drifting. The races are fun and not frustratingly hard, nor are they boring. Oh yeah, another neat feature is the rewind feature. Say you're in first place on the last lap of a long race and you've got one more sharp corner to make and some douche in a Lamboraghini Murcielago is right on your @$$ and you make the turn too wide and he zips in front of you and wins. That sucks right? Well you can rewind up to that point and give it another go until you make the turn correctly, up to 5 times depending on difficulty. Or let's say you crash your Dodge Challenger SRT-8 and total it, you can rewind and save yourself a trip to the Dodge stealership with a check for $70,000!!! There are so many cool aspects to this game. It's a blast.
Overall
This game is definitely worth buying if you're into racing games or cars in general...which every single of you on here are
Just download the free demo and give it a whirl. The title screen music is seriously catchy and somewhat addicting. This is one of my favorite XBOX games for sure, right behind Call of Duty 4.
