The path of speed, destruction and recklessness is satisfying, if you call frustration satisfying.
Now, when you first play Takedown you're initial reaction is that the game rocks and that it's probably the best racing game you've played. And that's for good reason, as Takedown introduces a few new and tweaked mechanics. The first mechanic to notice is the change to the boost meter. In the previous Burnouts, you could only use your boost meter when it was filled up, but you can use your boost meter when you'd like in Takedown. This not only helps the game move much faster most of the time but it allows for some incredibly fast-paced races in-general. But the biggest mechanic in Takedown is the takedowns. How do you get a takedown you ask? Well, it's quite simple, you ram into your enemies and keep doing so until they crash, which rewards you with an increase to amount of boost you can carry and fills your boost meter up all the way.
Now, in the previous Burnouts if you crashed you'd lose much of your boost meter. However, in Takedown there's a new aftertouch takedown mechanic, which lets you turn your car while its crashed and if you're lucky, you'll hit an opponent and you'll get rewarded like you would a normal takedown. While this is probably the best new mechanic in the game, it also has been given to the enemy AI. Even though this makes the races much more tight and intense, the enemies have a thing for ganging up on you. You'll notice on many occasions that there will be four AI racers slamming into you until you crash and after that they'll just pull away and they won't bother trying to attack each other. I don't know about you, but if the enemy AI is only going to assault me and leave me in the dust while they don't hinder each other, I think I'm going to be quite frustrated and not want to play the game anymore.
Also, the game is incredibly fast, even from the get-go. While this is a great and awesome adrenaline rush at first, you'll quickly realize that the game is so fast and there's so much traffic that it becomes virtually impossible to avoid traffic like your enemies. This only adds to the frustration and significantly mars the experience of the game. It's not just the races that have been tweaked but the crash mode has been shifted as well. The best part about crash mode this time around is that when you crash and rack up enough damage you'll rewarded with a crashbreaker, which is the game's own way of saying "Here's an explosion, use it wisely". The crashbreaker is really a neat idea and it helps the crashes stay intense. You'll also see that there are numerous signs across the course. These signs will either help or harm your crash score depending on which one you hit. These range from increase cash score, crash multipliers, half crash score and if you play through multiplayer, there's also a crash score swap. This actually makes crash mode less exciting than before and makes it not as fun as it was in Point of Impact, especially if you're against one of your friends and he gets the score swap after you rack up tons of money while he got nothing.
Part of what has become part of what helps the Burnout games stay among other racers is that they have had great graphics and an incredibly smooth framerate. Takedown might be the flashiest and most detailed Burnout out of the first three but it's far from perfect. Again, the textures and detail in Takedown are impressive and the lighting is superb, especially on the cars. However, the smooth framerate that Takedown's predecessors had seems to have been put to waste. While you might not notice this at first, after playing for awhile you'll see that the camera will get quite frustrating when you take a turn. Not only that but when you're attempting to get an aftertouch takedown the camera will aim in front of you, meaning you won't be able to see where your enemies are coming from and making it a miracle to be able to get an aftertouch takedown. Yes, the game might be flashy and very easy on the eyes, but what good is that and the gameplay if you can't see where you're going?
Now, Takedown developed by Criterion again, but the publisher hands has been given to EA. Since EA's in the picture, guess what that means? EA Trax! Like almost every other EA Trax "volume", Takedown's music is mediocre and doesn't even fit the game. Yes, it's nice to see that the Burnout series has gotten a license soundtrack, but the soundtrack just sucks, you're better off with the custom soundtrack option. Now, the cars sound great at first, but then you'll realize that most of the cars sound the same and makes the game get boring pretty quickly. Fortunately, Takedown, like its predecessors gets a leg up with its audio thanks to the once again, superb sound effects from crashes, explosions and collisions. But even with nice sound effects, Takedown doesn't deliver with music or car sounds, and the annoying DJ doesn't help either.
Burnout 3: Takedown is a good game through and through, but I was really disappointed by how the game executed some of it mechanics. While some of them might be nice like the takedowns and crashbreakers, the cheap enemy AI, horrible framerate, ridiculous power-ups and power-downs in crash mode and the overwhelming amount of traffic make Takedown nothing more than a frustrating racing game with nice visuals, a good amount of chaos and some new mechanics.