Burnout Review

By the time a console has been put out to pasture by its manufacturer, chances are there will be at least 20 different arcade-style driving games to choose from for that platform. With so many choices, it's obvious that developers have to come up with a unique selling point to make their game stand out from the pack. Such is the case with Burnout's elaborate crashes, which send cars careening through the air and spinning out of control. But crashes alone do not a game make, and thankfully there's enough meat on Burnout's bones to provide an engaging, albeit unoriginal, take on arcade racing.

Compared with other games in its genre, Burnout has a healthy roster of gameplay modes. The primary single-player experience is found in the championship mode, where there are four different three-race circuits to compete in and two marathon races spread across 14 different tracks to complete. As you complete events in the championship mode, new gameplay modes are unlocked such as head-to-head races against exotic cars and a free roam mode for up to two players. There are just a handful of cars included in the game, and while they bear a striking resemblance to cars you'll see out on the road, they are not officially licensed. But this allows the game to bash, crash, and destroy cars in just about every imaginable way without angering execs at huge car companies, so the trade-off is a fair one. The cars are rated based on three different difficulty settings, but there are no ratings to show you how differently they're supposed to perform. Perhaps it's because feeling the differences from one car to another while out on the road is no easy task. In addition to the championship mode, there's also a single race option, a time attack mode that places you on the course by yourself, and a head-to-head mode for up to two players.

Playing Burnout is about as easy as playing driving games can get. You have a gas button, a brake button, and a turbo button. The object is to make it to each checkpoint before the timer expires and take first overall. As you weave in and out of oncoming traffic without wrecking, a turbo meter gradually builds until it reaches the top. Once the meter peaks, you have access to a turbo boost that you can use at your leisure. The trick is to get your turbo boost and head into the other lane so that your turbo meter builds just as quickly as you're using it--giving you perpetual turbo.

The steering in the Xbox version of Burnout is a bit sluggish when compared with the steering in the PlayStation 2 and GameCube versions, but after some practice you'll be whipping in and out of traffic in no time. The catch is that if you do happen to wreck, you'll be significantly delayed while the crash is shown from three different camera angles. There's no way to skip the replays, and after the first few hours with the game, the novelty of the crashes wears off. There's nothing worse than seeing other cars leave you in the dust as you watch a fender bender three consecutive times. Another annoying aspect of the game is the seemingly fuzzy criteria it uses to determine whether you've been in an accident. Sometimes you can crash into the wall at 100mph and the race will continue, while other times you'll brush the side of another car or check its bumper and you're forced to watch the dreaded crash replays. Monetary values are given to each crash depending on its severity, but many times a two-car pileup will be deemed more expensive than rolling your car several times. The money values are then added up so the game can show you just how pitiful you are. How is this supposed to motivate players to continue?

You wouldn't think that a game featuring crashes as its sole innovation would ask you to keep from crashing, but after playing Burnout for several hours, it becomes obvious that winning each race is simply a matter of not wrecking. This is due, in part, to the computer AI. If you follow your fellow competitors around the track, you'll find that they make mistakes all on their own and have problems weaving through thick traffic. Not only does it make the gameplay realistic beyond what you'd expect from an arcade racing game, but it also gives you hope that no matter how far behind you are, you still have a chance. Of course, there's no course radar, so knowing just how far you are behind the field is impossible. Traffic will cross each track at several predetermined spots, but the movement of the cars is completely scripted, so it's easy to avoid collisions.

As mentioned previously, the controls for the Xbox version of Burnout aren't quite as tight as those found in the GameCube and PlayStation 2 versions. Thankfully, the forgiving yet realistic physics model used in the game ensures that it's still a joy to play. But powersliding, one of the mainstays of arcade racing games, seems to happen by accident most of the time. Instead, you're forced to manage your gas and brake around each turn and lose valuable speed. Going against the grain where most arcade driving games are concerned, the courses are absolutely huge, and it can take up to four minutes just to complete one lap. This seriously limits the pick-up-and-play aspect of the game and makes Burnout seem more steeped in simulation than you'd think. In all, Burnout does a good job of being a workable arcade driving game, but you're forced to avoid its only unique feature--the dramatic crashes--to succeed at the game.