Criterion set themselves quite the challenge by creating a sequel to arguably the greatest arcade racing game of all time, Burnout 3: Takedown. The game in question was praised not only by critics and gamers around the world, but by just about everyone in the IGN offices, which is quite rare.

The answer to this challenge is Burnout Revenge, the fourth game in the critically acclaimed Burnout series. As with the first and second sequels, Criterion has introduced some new and significant changes aimed at further improving on an already near-perfect arcade racing experience. Has Criterion managed to raise the bar again, or have they set their own standards too high before? Well, maybe a little bit of both…

Checking Traffic

With the original Burnout, Criterion laid the foundation for what would become the best arcade racing series of this generation: lightning-fast cars, ultra-responsive controls, and brutal crashes. Burnout 2: Point of Impact turned the first game’s exciting accidents into a standalone, now-legendary crash mode. Burnout 3: Takedown added the ability to actually fight, smash, and destroy (or take down) enemy cars. This gave the racing mode a more combat-like feel, and Road Rage was born. All of these additions were brilliantly conceived and implemented, arguably resulting in a better game every time.

A great new toy in Burnout Revenge is the ability to direct traffic or ram vehicles from behind in the same direction, sending your vehicle flying into other traffic or enemies. This is the biggest new addition to the series and is a key part of all game modes, so in many ways the overall success of Burnout Revenge hinges on Directing Traffic’s ability to expand the series in new and, more importantly, for the better.

In some ways it is, but in many ways it’s kind of a side-track (or maybe a misstep) for the series. Let’s start with the good:

Following the flow of traffic looks super cool, but can cause some pretty horrible accidents while racing. Throwing your car four car lengths forward only to watch it roll back across your windshield at 200 mph is awesome, especially if there’s a bus involved. In controlled traffic, you have a tendency to launch enemy vehicles into the air like on a moving ramp, and the game likes to slow down and show you how you’ve taken down an enemy, so you get plenty of great views of your rival taking off like a rocket, only to end a few seconds later in a fiery carnage with no idea where it happened.

The ability to control traffic has also been added with the return of Road Rage and Crash modes. Road Rage is pretty much the same as last time, but now you can hurl vehicles at targets, essentially giving you the unguided missiles we’ve always loved at your disposal. Road Rage still performs best when swapping colors with oncoming traffic, but hurling a taxi into your windshield is pretty rewarding. These mobile missiles are also pretty useful in Crash, as many of the intersections are so large that it’s impossible to cover them yourself without a little help. We’ll be back to Crash in a minute, though.

Now, the bad (or at least the not so good):

First off, the new Traffic Attack mode pales in comparison to the crashes and road rage that were added to the last two Burnout titles. Sure, it’s hard to win three times in a row, but Traffic Attack feels like the weakest new mode in the series so far. It’s not that this mode is frustrating or time-consuming, quite the opposite. Since the only objective in this mode is to smash into traffic and rack up points, it’s very easy to complete each Traffic Attack event with a gold medal on your first run. It’s fun the first or second time around, but it gets boring pretty quickly. Luckily, traffic attack events aren’t that common and don’t last that long (you could spend 15 minutes of your entire single-player career on these), so in reality, traffic attacks are basically a waste of time.

But what has a more lasting effect on the game as a whole is the fact that controlled traffic is only there for your benefit: computer-controlled opponents can’t seem to beat you with a stray vehicle, meaning you get access to weapons they don’t actually have, giving you a distinct advantage. And because controlled traffic doesn’t require any special skill to take advantage of, it’s very easy, and actually quite common, to beat a rival without doing anything other than weaving through traffic going in the same direction. Sure, you lose a little bit of speed, but the increased boost partially makes up for it, and the wave of chaotic destruction that takes down all nearby enemies definitely makes up for it. Again, it looks pretty cool, but it does throw the race off balance.

Easy Does It

It becomes much easier to keep your car in single, as you can slip through traffic moving in the same direction, i.e. traffic that is not a bus or a large truck. One of the absolute best aspects of the Burnout series so far is the constant, sometimes overwhelming fear of an accident. Driving at over 300km/h around highway curves and intersections with five rivals chasing you used to be a nerve-wracking experience, but now you can easily pass through about half the cars in the game, and some of it has become a piece of cake. Lost.

In the late game, it also becomes very easy to defend any leads you gain. Once you get to about 6th place in the game (out of 10 ranked segments), you will start to unlock Crashbreaker Race, Crashbreaker Eliminator, and Crashbreaker Road Rage. As the name suggests, the vehicle features a crash breaker as well as a crash mode. So if you bite the bullet, you can pull the trigger and put some caps on your rivals’ butts.

This works well in Crashbreaker Road Rage, but in Crashbreaker Eliminator and especially Crashbreaker Race (as these are more common), you essentially have a very strong defensive mechanism. Cars no longer just fly past you after a crash, as you can now easily move around while dragging them along.

Burnout 3 introduced aftertouch, which is effectively a much simplified (and infinitely fairer) version. It helped to prevent enemies from flying past you after a crash, but it required skill to maneuver through the wreckage, enemies were easily avoided, and most importantly, you couldn’t actually move forward unless you were airborne.

In Crashbreaker races, you can ignite your crashbreaker after a crash as long as you have boost. It’s very common to take out three or four opponents in one explosion, effectively negating the crash. As long as you’re using a car with a reasonably high (i.e. wide) crashbreaker force rating, you can basically always wreck your car and still easily stay in the race. If all the cars with larger, wider crashbreakers were slower, that wouldn’t be so bad, but with the highest level cars readily available, you’ll get a 6x increase in crashbreaker force in exchange for about 5 miles per hour of speed. The choice here is very easy, but very unfair.

And just as traffic controls are weapons that only you can use, so are crash breakers in races. Of course, from a design perspective, it’s not fun, especially when your opponents can take you out in abandoned cars you’ve never seen before or make it virtually impossible to overtake after an accident. So, while I understand why computer-controlled cars can’t take you out in such a way, that doesn’t mean it’s ultimately unfair and unbalanced.

Everything Else is Pizza

Burnout announced to the world that one of the main aspects of Revenge is no longer as fun as it used to be, but that’s not the end of the world. In fact, almost every other aspect of the Burnout series has been improved, refined, polished and enhanced in some way.

For example, the game’s track design is truly amazing. While I would have liked to see more of the massive 180+ degree turns that are a big part of Burnout 2, the track design in this series has never felt more natural, fluid, and maybe even fun.

An improvement on the tracks is that they were designed for combat. Taking down cars in Burnout 3 was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a racing game, but the tracks weren’t strictly designed for combat. This was cool in a way, as you sometimes have to invent your own takedown spots, but it wasn’t as fun as this time around, as many sections of the track were built specifically for takedowns. If you’re driving tire-over-tire with a rival and see a narrow, tri-cusped archway in the distance, you know one of you is in a pinch.

If you remember Burnout 3’s Chicago-inspired “Downtown” level, the track was made up of a series of pillars supporting the city’s elevated railway. You had to drive between or alongside the cars, but choosing a lane meant going straight through. Burnout Revenge has a similar section on the Motor City track, but this time the pillars are spread out and there’s barely a safe straight in sight. Fighting an enemy vehicle here means the same potentially doom-inducing pillars could easily hit your rival’s front fender. The game has a ton of such takedown setups, each serving to exaggerate the game’s focus on combat.

That’s cool, but what’s more striking about the track design this time around are the newly added alternate routes and shortcuts. Blue lights indicate an alternative, sometimes shorter, route to follow, but these routes often come with a big risk factor. You might be able to shave a few seconds off your lap time by choosing a faster route, but this method also increases your chances of hitting the hard side of the bar.

The shortcuts also usually offer the coolest jumps in the game. Sometimes you have to cross the main track, soaring over your competitors for a big jump before turning into a narrow alley on the other side of the track or crashing into the side of a building. The same applies here: risk vs reward.

The natural flow of the alternative routes is just outstanding. You can exit a side road and naturally move onto another side road, or exit a narrow lane to cross a main road and go through a gate to continue on a shortcut. Sometimes it feels like the shortcut is the main route, but this is a feature of good track design overall.

Some routes have an abundance of alternative routes, so you can stay on that route for more than half the time of a lap. However, these shortcuts only give you a few extra seconds, but they don’t give you a significant lead, so you can ignore them completely and still win the race. Some Burning Lap events are very time-critical events, so you basically have to take quite a few shortcuts, but the race gives you the opportunity to race wherever you want, which I really appreciate.

A Bit of the Old

The track designs also bring back fond memories of Burnout 2’s courses. Some of the tracks feature wide, twisty turns that were very common in the second game and rarely seen in Burnout 3. Some of us in the office are big fans of these sections, as they’re the perfect place for a cool 5-second powerslide at any time.

But even more than the tracks, the car designs in general are pretty reminiscent of Burnout 2’s original designs. Burnout 3’s cars are basically copied versions of real cars, and we’re nostalgic for them, but the misnamed Ferrari 360 Modena crashes. Our Favorites – It’s cooler to see what Criterion comes up with on their own, especially in Crossroads, since the original car designs in the series are generally very good.

Crash

The Crash mode this time around is probably better than Burnout 3. To the delight of most of us in the office, all icons have been removed. This means no more boosts or insta-crash breakers, but it also means that tactics for each stage are essentially severely limited, since players aren’t always aiming for 4x multipliers at intersections. In other words, it’s still possible to pull off a crash, even if your original plan is ruined.

If you’ve been following the progress of Burnout Revenge, you’ll know that Crash starts out very similar to a golf game. On the left side of the screen you will see a home meter, which is the same as the swing meter in many golf games or the kick meter in some soccer titles. A successful jump means you have reached the appropriate boost level and accuracy at the bottom of the “swing”. If you don’t see the

indicator then one of two things could be happening: You need to restart immediately if you are playing in single player mode or change your plans immediately. If you are playing alone, it can be quite annoying as missing an ad means you have to start over from the beginning. However, if you are playing with friends and you miss one it’s a different story as you will need to take immediate action. Many of the intersections are multi-level, so even many of the intersections that feature massive jumps and landings at the top of the multi-level highway can still cause serious accidents at the bottom, even if the end result wasn’t ideal. This is great because it will increase your score. So, while a failed jump can lower your score, if you can adapt to the environment, traffic, speed, and trajectory, you can still cause quite a few casualties. This is great.

Speaking of multi-level environments, the crash intersections this time are much larger and more widely spaced than before. At an intersection, you may have to go through two intersections before you reach the third and largest one. So to maximize your score, you’ll need to check out a few unlucky taxi drivers at the first two intersections and cause them destruction while you wait to catch a bus at the third intersection. Some intersections have highway exits that make it basically impossible to get close to a large amount of vehicles without having the check-in traffic on your side.

It’s basically cool that you have to rely on controlled traffic to get a high score, but the result is that crashes are a little more random than before, which can be a little frustrating. It’s not enough to ruin the overall fun, but it can be a little frustrating when you see your friends doing something and catching almost every vehicle, and then you see yourself doing the exact same thing and a controlled car comes here and does something even worse. Moved there. Yes, you can target controlled vehicles, but they’re not an exact means of destruction, so relying on them is essentially a kind of gamble.

So overall the crashes are better this time around, but maybe some people would prefer a mode like Burnout 3. It’s still not close to the $100 million score of Burnout 2, but unfortunately that’s over now…

Multiplayer and Online

Ever since Crash was introduced in Burnout 2, the series has been great for both simultaneous and hotseat multiplayer games. Burnout Revenge makes things more interesting by introducing two new modes to multiplayer: Traffic Attack and Crash Tour.

Traffic Attack is a split-screen version of the single-player version, but it’s actually a bit more fun than playing alone. It’s harder to kill one person than one point, and each check seems more important. Still, you can move on to other events quickly enough.

Crash Tour, on the other hand, is a lot of fun. It’s similar to Crash Party in that up to six players can participate in various crash intersections and compete for the overall score, except that the goal is not to make as much money as possible overall, but to make as few “hits” as possible to win. The basic idea is that each intersection has a target amount of money, and each player must repeat each intersection until they reach their goal to increase their score. It’s a lot like golf in that the player with the fewest rounds wins. It’s a fun and refreshing Crash Party.

The standard multiplayer races, road rage, crash party, and crash battle are all still there and are basically the same as last time. That means the only thing that didn’t make it from Burnout 3 to Revenge is the co-op version of Crash.

All six game modes are available online, and the returning online mode works pretty much the same as it did last time. However, Crash Tour is different online and offline. We had to condense the mode a bit, because players don’t want to sit still while it takes l33tRaVeR69 seven turns to complete an intersection. Instead of competing for shots, you compete for points based on a leaderboard, and when players reach the target number, everyone moves on to the next intersection. So it works pretty well, but it’s not as cool as offline. Still, it’s a good alternative to Crash Party if you want a change of rules.

The online aspect has changed overall, both in terms of leaderboards and player groupings. First, the game has a party system that’s very similar to Halo 2. You add a group of friends to your current party, and that group travels with you into each mode. This makes it easy to put together a Road Rage team and track player points across different event types.

The ranking system for the online modes has also changed, with players’ rankings no longer determined by total wins or crash damage. Instead, Criterion has introduced an ELO rating similar to what Rainbow Six 3 uses for its online rankings. Winning against better players will increase your score faster, and losing to weaker players will decrease your score faster, making it more ideal for the best players to compete against others at their own level. Crash and Race modes will maintain separate ELO ratings, so players who only want to play one of the two types can still reach the top of the list.

The ELO system worked well in Rainbow Six 3, and a similar ranking style worked well in Halo 2, so we’re excited about this system. It’s hard to judge how well it will work without thousands of people online yet, but from what we’ve seen it’s a vast improvement over the last game’s simple stat tracking.

Great Looks, Great Sound

By now, you’ve probably seen a lot of footage and screenshots of Burnout Revenge, and maybe even played the demo, so you know how good the game is. At first glance, you might not see a huge improvement over Burnout 3, but this game offers a lot more track detail than its predecessor. The environments appear more detailed, but when you’re racing through them at top speed, it can be hard to see the fine details.
The
engine and environmental effects have been tweaked a bit compared to last year, but the game sounded so good that it didn’t really need any improvements. The audio effects are more animalistic this time around, and you can hear grunts, shrieks, and more hidden among the sound effects that can’t be produced by a machine. It’s more cinematic than realistic, but it fits the style of the game perfectly. The sound is once again awesome, there’s no other way to describe it. And yes, Xbox players will be happy to hear that custom playlists will be supported, although the soundtrack is slightly better this time around.

Conclusion

Burnout: Revenge isn’t perfect, but it’s an excellent addition to the series. The track design in this game is simply phenomenal, and the blistering speed is exhilarating. Few games on current consoles control better, look better, or sound better than this.

However, some design decisions that seemed good on paper keep this from being the best Burnout title ever. The ability to check traffic and use crashbreakers in later races makes the game much easier overall, eliminating the fear of crashing that was so prevalent in previous Burnout titles.

But despite its flaws, Burnout: Revenge is a must-buy for fans of its predecessor, which is pretty much anyone with an Xbox or PS2.

Verdict

Burnout Revenge is a game ahead of its time, a game that belongs to the next generation. The title was released last year on current-gen consoles and doesn’t contribute much in the innovation category, so EA lost some points. But Burnout Revenge proves that current-gen games can be successfully translated into great next-gen games. Of course, we don’t want this to become a trend, and it’s still hard to convince people who already own current-gen titles to buy it. But for everyone else, Burnout Revenge is the first exciting racing game on the 360. A solid single player and great online and multiplayer modes will keep you coming back for years to come.