Burnout is an overall good game but it’s not without it’s flaws.
Another problem I encountered was the takedown camera which shows in slow motion the crash you caused which when it jumps back on the race you can find your self hading into a wall and caused me to crash because I couldn’t see it coming and going from slow motion to 60 frames per second at blazing speed it’s tough to jump back into the race especially when your asked to take down 20 cars in 3 minutes. The game does have a high difficulty, which was a little higher then I like to see. The worst is the last races for time and position the others aren’t bad. The toughest is the timed races because you have to drive for 6 minutes blazing nitrous and avoid ANY screw-ups and make awesome time all at once. This is just not what I like to do in a game. I prefer games that are more fun then focusing as hard as you would on a mid term. Another camera issue I had was when trying to hit an icon in the slow motion crash mode where you control your wreckage, I would have to guess half of the time as to where the icon was because you have no camera control and it would cause you to miss an icon that is the difference between gold and silver.
The main feature is obviously the crashes and the main mode for that is the crash mode where you try to create huge piles ups for a total amount of money in damages. I found this to be incredibly repetitive and after I’d seen one I’d seen them all. The crashes look great but it just doesn’t hold my interest and felt more like a puzzle on how to get the right icons to get the gold medal. Lastly, just like Need for Speed by EA Games there are very few different tracks to race on and all the races are just sections of three large tracks. You get to see a lot of the same racetracks over and over again.
The games best attribute would definitely have to be it graphics. The car models look great and so do the environments. The crashes and explosions look very nice and when you hit a truck carrying items in the trailer they’ll go flying all over the road and it’s just a beautiful game. The most impressive part about this great looking game is the 60 frames per second aspect that makes these pretty pictures fly by you for the best sense of speed of any racer on the X-box. The sound effects are passable but could be better. The engines sounded more annoying then octane pumping. Does feature a large and various soundtracks along with the capability for custom soundtrack. The only problem here was for the life of me I could get it to save my preference for using the custom soundtrack and I had to change it every time I played the game. I’ve heard it can be done but for the life of me I couldn’t get mine to. The either needs to make the option savable and if it already is then make it easier to do. The only problem with a great soundtrack is that some races are so hard you have to totally ignore it to focus on winning.
The single player mode is insanely long, which is great if you can’t get enough of the game. I felt pretty burned out myself after playing all 173 races and at least a third of them are the bug crashes which I got burned out on way to quickly, but I felt that way about the rest of the races too. So if you’re not a huge fan it might end up being more of a chore to play through the entire single player mode. You can also play with friends and online as well. Overall I prefer less arcade style racers that are more about the race then the crash. I found the aforementioned gameplay issues to be bothering and not fun times. I did enjoy the game though, but definitely not one of my favorite racing games this generation. As usual this is just another example of a bad and misleading Jeff Worstmann review. I’d recommend this game more to people looking for a racing game who aren’t really into the genre and definitely like an arcade game.