Burnout Revenge is a great game on many levels, but haven't we done this before?
The first thing you'll notice when you fire this game up is the lack of the Single Event option. Everything is now in the World Tour mode which wouldn't be a bad thing, if it wasn't for the atrocious menu screens. All events are classified into 10 'ranks'. Each of those are divided into a list of events for each track in the rank. Follow? Good. Within each track category are the list of events in no perticular order. By completing these events, you earn stars. When you get a certain amount of stars, you unlock the next rank. (Remember, the ranks are that list of 10 menu selections) When you unlock a new rank, you unlock more events. When you finish these events, you gain stars towards the next rank, but you also unlock events in previous ranks that were locked to you before. It does this without indication of any kind, so you'll frequently have to browse through every single rank just to see if there is anything new to do.
Once you finally get through the hedge maze they call a World Tour menu, you get to play one of many game modes. There's the usual race, crash, road rage, and grand prix. Each of those events has a crashbreaker variant, which lets you explode your car upon crash. This allows you to get a few extra takedowns at expence of your boost meter. If you miss, you lose all your boost. There is one new mode, and this is traffic attack. Your goal is to destroy as many traffic vehicles you can within the time limit.
Now, the biggest new feature is traffic checking. This allows you to crash into any pedestrian vehicle assuming it's moving in the same direction as you, and it's not a bus or semi. When you hit a vehicle though, no matter how fast you're moving, it will go flying like a plastic bag caught in an updraft. The lack of realistic physics really takes away from the gameplay experience.
Crash mode is improved too, with all the cash bonuses taken out. You can also do an unlimited amount of crashbreakers. When vehicles crash, your crashbreaker bar builds up. When it's at it's fullest, you will rapid-fire press R2 in order to build up power.
Crash mode is also ruined by one main thing: golf. That's right, golf. To accelerate your car, you have to press X at the correct time on a meter that resembles a swing meter in golf. Miss the sweet spot, and you explode forcing you to endure the 40 second load time when you hit retry.
All in all, it's a fairly fun game. But I have not been able to keep myself glued to the game as I could in Burnout 3. EA have just tried to hard to make this game new, when all it would have needed to be an excellent game would be new tracks, cars, and modes. The rest is un-necessary.