Burnout Dominator is worth playing by anyone who likes racing and car crashes.
The Burnout series has always been about risk and reward. The games challenge players to race through busy streets and roads, avoiding traffic while slamming opponents into walls or other cars. You have a boost bar that can be filled by driving on the wrong way, nearly missing traffic, drifting through corners, jumping from ramps and taking out rivals.
In Dominator, if you fill your boost bar to the maximum, you'll get a Supercharge boost. Supercharge is just as powerful as regular boost, but if you use up all your charge at once, you'll do a Burnout. Before your Supercharge runs out, you should try to drive dangerously in order to fill a secondary boost bar. If this secondary bar is full when your main boost runs out, you refill the bar again and start a Burnout chain. This will allow you to remain at top speed while continuously boosting. This system makes races insanely fast and challenging, since you have to keep boosting if you want to continue Supercharging.
Thankfully, Traffic Checking is gone. I didn't like this feature in Revenge, and felt it made the driving much more sloppy and careless. Here's how the driving works in Dominator: if you hit a wall or any traffic car at a fairly high speed, you'll crash, which means you'll wreck your car, but you'll respawn back on the track with your damage fixed after a few seconds.
While you're in the Crash camera, you're still able to control your wrecked car with Aftertouch. You can even take down opponents if you get in their way. You can also make your car explode by pressing R2 after crashing, instantly destroying any opponent unlucky enough to be nearby. It's a great way to mitigate the frustration of having crashed or being taken down.
There is a variety of game modes in Dominator, including Race, which is self-explanatory, Road Rage (my all-time favorite), where your goal is to take down opponents and avoid getting totaled, Maniac, a fun and challenging new mode where you have to drive dangerously and chain Burnouts to earn points, Burning Lap, which is basically a time trial, and more. These modes are all great, but it's a shame that there's no more Crash mode.
There are also lots of cars in the game, 36 in total. Unlocking all of them is no easy task. Some require you to complete a certain objective in an event, such as scoring 500,000 Maniac Points or taking down a rival 3 times in a race to earn his car.
Oddly, there is no online multiplayer, which is a little disappointing, but fortunately there still is two player split-screen. It's as fun and chaotic as always, and you can put AI opponents in multiplayer races as well. If you have two controllers and a friend who also likes racing games, you'll certainly have hours of fun with Burnout Dominator's multiplayer.
The graphics in Dominator look really impressive for the PS2's standards. The environments are beautiful to look at and the textures are sharp. The motion blur looks good and helps give a great sense of speed. However, the vehicle deformation is somewhat blocky and could have been a bit better. There are a few instances of slowdown, but nothing serious enough to impact the gameplay.
The sound effects are top-notch: crashes, explosions, tires screeching, everything sounds great and doesn't seem out of place. The whooshing sound as you pass objects at high speed is a nice touch. And the annoying DJ from past Burnout games has finally been removed. The soundtrack is pretty good and fits the game really well, with mostly indie and punk rock. There are a few bad tracks, but you can customize the playlist to your liking in the EA Trax options.
Bottom line: Despite not being as good as Burnout 3, Dominator is still a great racing game, and has enough new features and tweaks to make it feel fresh. The gameplay is more challenging than Burnout Revenge, but also very accessible. Definitely worth playing by anyone who likes racing games, especially Burnout fans.
Gameplay: 8.5
Graphics: 8.5
Sound: 9.0
Overall: 8.5