tl;dr, it's $3 before a sale, so even if it's a bit rough and clearly a web game from ~2009, it's still darn good fun and worth picking up (so long as you have reasonable expectations)

The basic pitch is this: an arcade racing game where you play on tracks all over the world, in races both with and without weapons (all with explosions!), as you slowly unlock over a dozen cars, various upgrades, and beat boss vehicles. Sound fun? I agree.

This is a pretty fun game, with a surprising amount of depth for a Shockwave game! Many games from when I was young turn out to be only good in nostalgia, holding little value today. I am happy to say Burnin Rubber 3 doesn't fall into this category, and remains in a league above its contemporaries. There is a genuine sense of progression, lots of cars, and the graphics are even pretty good for the time! (Considering, again, this was a web game.) I have sunk well over 100 hours into this game over the years, possibly several hundreds. There is so much to do in this game, and a full first playthrough of the game could easily take 10+ hours. There is a decent level of challenge, with a good difficulty curve that ramps up as you get better, and cars become faster/more deadly. With that all said, this racing game's weakest element is the racing itself.

There are over two dozen tracks, each of which seem to have unique layouts.  There are also several different event categories, from traditional races, to battle races (races with guns, bombs, missiles, etc.), elimination races, and so on. They are all pretty fun, and while I have my favorites, I never really dreaded a race on the category alone. The tracks are fine enough, though it can be easy to get lost by missing a turn or taking a wrong turn. Also they can look kind of samey, with jungles in Colombia looking like jungles in Southeast Asia, for instance. The abundance of collectibles and placement of items are well thought out and fun to find / collect. There were hard limits on how much data you could stuff into an online game in this era, with download speeds in the single digits, so it's impressive what they could do. The environments, especially the jungles, are fairly lush, and show that Xform were committed to doing more than the bare minimum. This can contribute to those issues of getting lost, mentioned earlier. 

The cars are a strongsuit of this game. Whether a normal car or the fixed-stat "boss" cars, there are a number of them which you can race wherever you like. Granted, some of the early game cars don't work well late-game even with full upgrades, but I think that helps make the sense of progression all the more impactful. It also helps that these cars are fairly good-looking knockoffs of the real deals, kind of like cars in the Burnout franchise. There was a lot of love and care put into the graphics for this game, but most of all in these cars and their body upgrades, such as paint and bumpers. I like that the cars do feel faster from engine upgrades, though I wish there was more differentiation between the handling of the different cars. Usually the game operates on a very rigid system of "higher number = more of that stat", even if it doesn't make much sense for some of the boss vehicles. In short, the vehicles have little personality beyond appearances.

One of the most glaring omissions is the lack of any difference between terrain types. There is no difference between a smooth city road, a broken-ish rural road, dirt, snow, or grass. There isn't even any difference between an incline, or flat surface, beyond it being easier to fall off the side of a hill. With the placements of some items, I almost wonder if this was intentional, or if it was perhaps some kind of engine limitation. Nonetheless, it REALLY detracts from the racing elements, and can even hamper the track design, as without differentiation in how it feels to go across different terrain types, it can get easy to get lost in some of the more wilderness-based tracks (especially the jungle or desert areas). 

Now for the technical details. The UI, clearly ripped from Burnout Paradise, is well-implemented and easy enough to understand. The game has solid performance, but granted it should considering it is now around 13 years old at the time of posting this review, somehow. A couple bugs can be troublesome, however. The bloom effects, if not properly configured, can make some sections virtually unplayable with how bright it gets (don't tick 'bloom' and 'bloom+').  The biggest technical issue is that certain actions, like restarting a level from the end-level results screen, can cause all audio to die, requiring the game be closed and re-opened for it to reappear. As stated earlier, the graphics hold up well for what it is, and only benefit from modern hardware.

Overall, Burnin Rubber 3 is a very fun game, even with plenty of glaring weaknesses. Buy it, try it, and if you like it? Great! Enjoy. If not? It was only $3, which is still worth giving to Xform  considering they are one of the few Shockwave devs that have bothered to properly preserve their work and publish it for a new generation, not letting it wither into the memories of Internet Past like so many games (that have not been re-published or fortunately-saved into the Flashpoint Infinity project.)