Strap in your seatbelt and get ready for some real white knuckle arcade driving folks.
I’ll take a quick second to explain the concept for those of you new to the series. Burnout 2 up front provides some similar ways to play as other racing titles. You can select a single race mode to race any unlocked track with any unlocked vehicle, time attack to face the clock, or you can select a championship mode to race in a number of circuits to progress through the game and unlock new cars and tracks to race on. Pretty standard overall, but then the additions come into play that bring out the fun factor and set it apart. Burnout 2 doesn’t take place on a closed track with a bunch of spectators or sponsors watching. This game instead takes racing out to the streets where you violate numerous traffic laws to get the first place trophy. You will need to race through rush hour traffic jams at high speeds, run red lights through busy intersections, and drive on the wrong side of the road constantly making split second decisions to avoid a nasty wreck.
Some additions to the single player game modes that are new to Burnout 2 include Crash mode, which has you trying to rack up as much damage dollars as possible to obtain medals. For example, go racing at super high speed into the back end of a car stopped in traffic, then see how many buses you can bounce off of or how many other moving cars you can get to slide into and damage each other. Also, you have to complete an Offensive Driving 101 course before you can really get in and play the game. Don’t worry … it’s not really difficult and you’ll be in and running before you know it.
One of the biggest improvements to the game that I saw was the stackable combo style of the Burnout boost. In Burnout 2, you can grab a burst of speed once a Burnout meter fills all the way up. You increase it by grabbing air, drifting, and narrowly missing other vehicles. Stacking these up results in quicker filling, and by linking different things together you get additional quickness in topping it off. Basically, driving in between two semis will give you 2 narrow misses, then drifting around a turn into oncoming traffic will give you additional stacking for the drift plus the amount of time you stay in the wrong lane. You can almost re-fill it as you are using it by being creative and finding continuing ways to do these things, resulting in consistent high speed until you screw up.
Another neat addition to Burnout 2 is the mixture of race styles that you get to run in Championship mode. Starting off, you do a pretty standard “get the most points in three races to advance to the next level” thing, but then have to square off against an unlockable car to beat it and unlock it to play with in the next circuit. Then, rather than racing another ‘three race’ circuit, you can play a pursuit game which has you in a police car bashing a target vehicle at high speeds (similar to the old Chase H.Q. arcade game). This provides a fun and diverse aspect to the standard style, and breaks up monotony by not having you do the same thing over and over again.
Championship mode also branches into two different styles, since the fist one you race is a Standard Championship. These are your normal sports cars (and a new addition … hot rods) and the style and layout of level designs are reminiscent of the original series. Once you’ve beaten that one though, it’s off to the Custom Series Championship … which tricks out the initial vehicles for some serious speed and comes complete with body kits, decal sets, tuned engines and improved handling. While the Custom Series racers are the most intense racing vehicles in the game, don’t think you’re going to get shortchanged in the Standard mode. The overall speed has been turned up in Burnout 2 overall, providing some really high speeds and intense racing overall.
Graphically, Burnout 2 looks great. Everything while playing and in replays zips by at a fast and constant framerate, and even with a lot of vehicles on the road and dust particles fogging the screen, there wasn’t a single hiccup in the framerate, this is thanks to Renderware, the technology that was used to create this game. Renderware doesn’t really take advantage of systems potential power, but it allows for a lot of chaotic action to take place, present a fair amount of detail, and not loose the flawless flow of the framerate. The vehicles, lighting effects, and backgrounds themselves all look great, and while they’re not “GT3 great”, they look good in their own right and the game looks better than the PS2 version in my opinion. The big winner here though is the replays when crashes occur, which result in a slow motion replay to capture in full and painful detail all of the flying metal and traffic pileup enjoyment that you caused from multiple camera angles. The presentation in the Crash mode also really stuck me as nifty, since the camera will show all of the fender bending that happened while it’s going on … but will then move to a traffic copter to do a pan and swing by of the accident scene to show you how much destruction you caused overall.
The sound to Burnout 2 didn’t fare quite as well as the graphics and gameplay unfortunately, and while it’s not horrible, it deserves a little more effort. The engine sounds all have that same whiney racing tone to them which was pretty close to what you’ll hear in some other racers, but cars like a ford style hot rod also had the same whiney noise only dropped to a lower decibel level. A growling, staccato style engine noise with a thunderous start off rev would have been great for these style vehicles, but it just wasn’t there. The music in Burnout 2 is new, and the developers added in some heavier rock tunes on top of the boppy techno beats found in the original. They’re not terrible, but just a little repetitive and easily forgotten. One neat thing that was done was the volume increase that happens when you use the Burnout boost … but with some of the less enjoyable tracks you’ll probably wish that it didn’t happen. The crashing and tire squealing sounds found when collisions and traffic accidents occur, sounded great though, but I would have loved to see some of that same quality in the rest of the sound presentation.
Overall, racing fans will get a kick out of Burnout 2. This has to be one of the neatest racing ideas that I’ve seen in a while, and it is one of the only racing games that I have played that literally had me sitting up on the edge of my seat or holding my breath in anticipation as I narrowly wedged in between two buses or locked up in fear when I knew that I was getting ready to hit another vehicle or plow head on into a truck. The only thing that I could see that would take away from anyone’s enjoyment of this game is if you just have to have realism or a standard racing title to enjoy a racing game. If not, it’s worth the price and will provide many hours of fun and enjoyment. Strap in your seatbelt and get ready for some real white knuckle arcade driving folks, Akklaim has brought us one heck of a great and painful arcade racer on the Gamecube again.