The first thing you notice is that the game on PS2 doesn't look worse than the Xbox version. Things look pretty nice and graphical errors like clipping and jumping textures do happen but are limited to a minimum.

To get all this graphical beauty out of Sony's not so young blue box you'll have to settle with long loading times that reoccur each time you restart something. But once passed that you can enjoy the fastest racing game the PS2 has known until now. A big congratulations to Criterion by the way, as during the racing itself there's no problem what so ever with low framerates or slowdowns. Also the sound is very much ok as next to the heavy-sounding engines of the (fictious) cars you can enjoy a fun - but not so varied - soundtrack.

Still, there's one downpoint and it's instantly something I've got serious problems with; the decision of EA to completely localise the game and no option to set the "English language" available. About the only terms that haven't been translated are "Takedown" and "Revenge". For the rest everything, and I mean e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g, has been translated.

There isn't so much to say for the rest. The gameplay is as fun as it's easy - extremely fun so to say - and next to the solo game you also have the possibility to drive in splitscreen or online all sorts of cars off the road. Ben Hur but with cool cars instead of chariots. The difficulty level nicely rises as you progress in the game, some goals are quite irritatingly hard to get but most are just a fun challenge. The PS2 version gets a couple more points from me because despite the lesser hardware it succeeds in giving almost identical graphics to its Xbox counterpart.