Once again, it's a near-perfect game... but the drawbacks are still annoying.
Burnout Revenge on the original Xbox lost quality in a camera problem involved in Impact Time. When you activated it, the camera would swing around behind your car, making it impossible to see the oncoming cars you were trying to steer your wreck into. This issue basically made one of the most definitive features of Burnout completely useless. So did it carry over into the 360 version like all the other traits of the Xbox version? I am happy to report that no, that was fixed for the High-Def installment of the crash-happy series. So why isn't this game perfect? Like the local news, I'm holding my grim stuff for the end to make you sit through all the happy-go-lucky information first!
Burnout Revenge on the 360 is basically an arcade racing gamer's dream come true. It's blindingly fast...and I really mean that, it is BLINDINGLY fast. Cars push well over 220 mph while boosting, and that's just the light models I'm talking about. Not only that, but it looks gorgeous while accomplishing this level of speed and intensity. Though from time to time the graphics may get a tad bit bogged down, I have only experienced it a couple of times and it didn't hinder gameplay at all. Car models are beautiful, and usually pretty stylish. Cars don't get as banged up as they used to, instead favoring a system that applies nasty paint scratches to the vehicle by the end of the event.
The game also sounds great, with cars and crashes both sounding very convincing. The menus have a nice, satisfying metallic nature to all of their sounds. If I was going to nitpick the sound I would really only have the soundtrack of "EATrax" to complain about. It sucks. However, that's not really an issue here as I can plug my iPod (or any other music storage device, mind you) into my 360 and play my own music instead...a feature that is absolutely priceless.
The control could not be tighter, but unfortunately something they changed from Burnout 3 is that the turning is not as sharp as it used to be...which means you will not be able to simply twitch-slam into your opponents to get take them down... you will actually have to work for it this time around. It is arguable that this just means you have to get very skillful, but I call it frustrating.
Online play is a tad frustrating. First, you have to agree to the EA disclaimers and then EA promptly tricks you into signing up for their newsletter by setting "No, Thanks" to the A button and "OK" to the B button...the exact opposite of what one would expect. Then, once you're in the EA web of evil, you will begin to hunt for games. You will invariably be kicked out of many games before you find one to play, and then you will cry if you get a different mode than you want to play and it won't let you back out of it even once it's over.
So here we are, at the end of the review, and I still haven't said much negative of the game. This may not bug everyone else as much as me, but it does still get to me: the physics are too darned realistic. It used to be that when you hit anything in Burnout, you would get some air or spin and the ability to steer your wreck effectively into other cars... but basically 9/10 crashes on here will have you stopped dead in your tracks and sure, you can see the oncoming cars but you have no momentum to actually steer your wreck into them. Boo.
Still, at the end of the day, if you can't get into those heavy-duty racers like PGR3 or Test Drive Unlimited, then this is the 360 racer to get. Burnout Revenge is just an awesome game.