What’s the game about: It’s the much-anticipated evolution of Criterion’s beloved arcade racer, with a densely packed open-world environment that we’re assured is the equivalent of nearly 30 square miles in size.

What’s new for E3: The environment is fully realized, and you can drive pretty much anywhere to indulge in Burnout-like shenanigans. Unlike previous versions of the game, you won’t find any “formal” events — you trigger everything in the environment through your actions. Traffic is dense and behaves in a believable fashion, making the shift to a sandbox-style game feel like a natural evolution of the series. Also on show at E3 is the PlayStation Eye integration for multiplayer games; the game now takes a snapshot of you every time you crash and sends it to the other seven people racing around the city with you.

What we like: After the disappointment of Burnout Dominator, it’s good to see the series taking a big step forward again. Traffic checking is back, as is the Crash mode (albeit in a completely new form, which we’ll get into in a moment), and the damage model has been thoroughly overhauled. Unlike previous versions of the game, damage is now a cumulative thing, so getting into wrecks no longer brings the action to halt. In the words of Lead Designer Alex Ward, “If it still has all four wheels, you can still drive it.” In the time we played the game, we were able to smash into vehicles head-on, in spectacular fashion, and still drive away.

Shown for the first time at E3 is the way that you trigger events in the environment. You activate races and high-speed challenges by pulling up to stoplights and hitting the L2 and R2 triggers. You activate Crash mode, which is now an elective event, by pulling L1 and R1 at any time. Ward tells us that the carefully constructed Crash modes of previous games are no longer part of the vision for the product, and they have been replaced with something far more appropriate for the open world environment. We tried the new method out on the open road, and while it currently doesn’t offer the hugely satisfying and explosive results we saw in Burnout Revenge, it does provide a new competitive hook.

After building up some serious boost, we threw the Stallion (think a fake, early ’70s Mustang) into a line of traffic and triggered the crash. The car immediately flipped up into the air and smashed down on the first car in line. By jabbing the X button at exactly the right moment, we were able to repeatedly “bounce” the Stallion back up into the air and work our way down the line. As the carnage ensued, the game was tracking the total distance “bounced” for that particular stretch of road while comparing all that data to that of all other players, as well as those on our buddy list. If you can keep the crash going over a farther distance than anyone else, the data is pegged to that particular stretch and sets as the bar for anyone else that tries it.

What we dislike: Some of the car models are a little more “floaty” than we would normally like. The muscle cars, particularly, were far from planted on the road, and they became quite hard to control at high speed. That said, this is still a very early version of the game, so we expect this to change considerably in the coming weeks.

Originally from 1UP