It's a tragedy that a highly respectable name of a great franchise was slapped onto this horrible letdown of a game.
It makes you wonder what was going through Criterions' minds during the development of this port. Well, they didn't develop it. Criterion had some other developer, by the name of Visual Impact, to do the dirty work for them. You should be wondering what went through Criterions' minds when they decided to have someone else make a Burnout game. What were they thinking!?
So, onto the game. Since it's just the same game as the PSP port, you'd expect this to be exactly the same, only to have some toned-down visuals to suit the DS hardware. But no, it isn't. When the PSP version first starts off, it shows a video of someone crashing and then someone else crashing into him. An explosion appears, the title pops up, and licensed music plays. Then a video that loops through the menus plays. On the DS version, you get all that but the licensed music. The the video that you expect to be played through the menus starts to play, but then fades out, and what replaces it is a dark still image. There's your menu. Pretty isn't it. Compared to the PSP version, the menus are bland and unappealing. Underneath the dark still image, there's a banner that scrolls across the screan saying, "Welcome to Burnout Legends." They actually welcome you to this? What a first impression.
Then there's the horrible music. You mean they couldn't even get a licensed soundtrack? Instead, you get a bunch of crappy MIDI tracks that constantly irritate you to no end. Then there's the fact that there's only about 4 of them for the menus and one for each track in the game. So when you keep restarting a race because you can't beat it, the same horrible music plays from the begining, and drives you insane. There's no excuse. The DS is perfectly capable of licensed music. At least they have the God-danged courtesy to allow you to mute it in the options menu.
Enough with the menus. Lets move on. As in most Burnout games, there's a career mode where you basically have to get bronze, silver, or gold in every event possible to unlock lots of goodies. You pick your car class, event, and your car to race. Well, like I said about the game not being entirely the same, the events are different as well. For instance, the Compact class: The events in this class for both PSP and DS ports are completely different. WHY!? It makes no sense. And to add to all this nonsense, they never even included a crash mode. The PSP version has the crash mode lifted directly from Burnout 3 that you could access with the square button on the map screen, but the DS version simply has a race mode called Crash with entirely different setups that even include setups on Burnout 2 tracks which you think would be cool, but there's only about 10 of them, and they all reek of doggy waste. The cars in the game look terrible. They're low-poly, and they have the look of a bad quality internet video.You know, the ones with boxes.
Judging by this review, we haven't even started a race yet, and already, there's a terrible impression of the game. Now lets start the race. The only compliment that I can give this game is that the loading times are faster. On the PSP, they're horrible. But that's not saying much considering that the DS uses cartridges which allow for instant access times.
When you start the race, you're presented to yet another DIFFERENT "Get Ready" sequence. God, why can't they be the same!? The controls are not the same either. They're God-awful bad. All the Burnout games have tight controls. When you turned, you turned at just the right amount, and if you turn for a second, you go into a mild drift, which works out great. But here, you don't turn enough, and when you turn for a second, you go into a crazy, almost uncontrollable drift that will most likey send you into a wall. And when you hit a wall, there are 3 options: Bounce off like a bumper kart, get stuck, or crash, with the former options being just plain annoying. The cars are also floaty as heck, and there's no pure sense of speed. In fact, when you boost in the game, it actually feels like you're going slower. Why? Because the camera pulls out and up a little, and the blur effects don't affect the car. Basic logic: The farther away and up the camera is from the car, the lower the sense of speed. And if the cars don't bur along with the environents, it looks as though the car is in front of a green screen, which makes already floaty cars even floatier. Clipping is also an excessive habit of this game no matter what you're doing. Overall, there is no fun to have when racing.
It's almost impossible to take down your enemies, as when you hit them, they most likey won't crash. But wait, if you happen to "Shunt" them, (Ram into the rear.) they magically get taken out instantly. Applying that to Burnout logic would simply be impossible. It's too easy to execute on your enemies. Plus, the AI isn't as aggressive as it should be, so you should complete every race without a problem from your opponents. There aren't a lot of opponents too. The AI is so bad that in Grand Prix mode, where you have a tournament of races, driver 1 always places 2nd, driver 2 always places 3rd, and driver 3 places 4th every time in every grand prix. I assure you that I've played every event in this game, and that was the end result in every grand prix event in the game.
Crashing is terrible too. When you crash, you can slow down time around you in Aftertouch mode and steer you car slightly to wreck into other opponents for aftertouch takedowns. In Burnout games, when you activate aftertouch, you get some eerie music music playing with wooshes and other sorts of cool effects. In Burnout Legends for the DS, you don't get any of that. The MIDI music doesn't even stop when you crash of activate aftertouch. The crashes are weak too. The cars rarely deform, and the only thing that stick out is the broken glass, and it sucks too. It's also a lot harder to take enemies down with aftertouch, since the control sucks, the AI sucks, and the crashes suck too. Sometimes, they don't even last for half a second which doesn't even give you enough time to scratch your head or say wtf. So why bother. Using aftertouch in this game is just a waste of time. Good luck trying to get any good use out of it.
Speeking of crashes, lets get back to talking about the "crash mode." It's the worst aspect of this game. In a normal Burnout game, crashes involved aftertouches, boosting, crashbreakers which explode your car, multipliers, and causing 20-car pile ups worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. But here, you're lucky to cause a 5-car pile up with 80,000 dollar damages. The cars involved in the crashes don't do normal human actions like brake hard and swerve into a crash. Instead, they just drive into it like they're blind and out for a Sunday stroll. It's not fun, it's slow, and it ruins the whole point of having the mode in the first place. The whole point of crash mode is, well, I just said it.
The graphics just suck. All the objects are muddy and unappealing to look at. The road looks OK, but it's the only thing worth nothing. Cars clip through each other too, a lot. Some objects are even unrecognizable. For example, in the Palm Bay Marina level, there were these red and white barriers that reminded me of racetrack barriers, but when I got the PSP version, I realized that they were supposed to be guard rails. Just look at a screenshot, and you'll know what I mean. The "normal guy" cars sometimes don't even look like cars at all. The busses in the game look like compacted blocks of dried bird poo on wheels. But thank God there aren't many of them. You'll probably see about 5 per lap. Seriously, there's nothing going on in the environments. The worst feature about the graphics is the nasty fade in effect. There's a 2-D background in front of you, but then all of a sudden, a building or a mountain range fades in from nowhere. Especially on Big Surf Shores. There's this one part where in front of you, there's a big ocean, and then a bunch of hills pop up in front of the sea. That makes sense, right?
Believe it or not, the sound may actually be worse. Already thanks to the lame MIDI music, the sound effects fare no better. They're weak and unrealistic. They don't even remotely resemble what they're supposed to. Crashes sound like puhs, explosions sound like kahs, and brakes, well, they just sound bad too. It all boils down to total garbage, and along with the music, you'll want to mute the effects as well.
There's also multiplayer. You can play the game locally with 3 other buddies on one cartridge, but good luck finding even one buddy who would want to play this piece of crap with you. There isn't any online play either. Mabye, that's for the better.
You can recieve (almost) all the unlockable cars and awards that you can in the PSP version of the game, but it also exclusively includes the "I wasted 12 hours of my life playing this horrible piece of crap" award for when you get 100% completion. (sarcasm).
The really disastrous thing about this game is that it carries the Burnout name, a name that through the years, has gained credibility as one of the best arcade racing series to date, if not, the best. You can just about put Burnout on any game, and it'll be good, right? I bought this game from seeing a commercial on T.V. for it, "hearing" good things about it, and picking up the wrong version in the store, all because it had the Burnout name on it. It showed that Criterion made it too right on the back of the box, so how could you go wrong? Only by reading the credits in the game do you learn about who really made this bomb of a game. Well Criterion, I bet that you've learned your lesson. Never let anyone else make Burnout games. The people who made this game ruined every single aspect of it, whether it be graphics, controls, game modes, or even the menus. They may have included everything from the PSP version, but not one thing from it came out well. They made a lazy and failed attempt to port the great and memorable PSP version to the DS. Everything that makes a Burnout game, well, Burnout, is gone or broken. Please do yourself a favor, and forget that this game exists. Forget that there is a DS version. Forget that it's a Burnout game, because it isn't.