Burnout: Revenge review

I don’t even want to begin thinking about how many speeding tickets I ought to have received during the last hour. I’ve been racing completely irresponsibly through quiet towns. I’ve been smashing wrecked cars around and hammering my opponents into concrete walls. And it’s all taken place at a ludicrous velocity, which would have given ordinary people nosebleeds and blackouts, as well as making the Council for Road Safety choke on the afternoon tea.

Luckily, my exploits take place on the Xbox, with Criterion’s newest chapter of the Burnout saga, and it’s all about over-the-top racing with such a dramatically humoristic twist, that nobody ought to take offence. Burnout: Revenge is a really good game.

It looks gorgeous, it has lots of gaming modes and all the high-speed thrills you could possibly desire. However, this is also the case with its predecessor, Burnout 3, and this puts me in a bit of a tight spot. Is this just more of the same, or does it merit another purchase for fans of the series? Let’s go racing to find out.

Crazy opponents

The primary part of Burnout: Revenge is the all-out racing against AI opponents. The races take place primarily in cities, which don’t have real-world names, but still manage to look and feel like real American cities or little Italian mountain villages. And let’s get one thing straight from the start: these races are down and dirty, blindingly fast thrillrides.

As soon as you put the pedal to the metal in the new Burnout game, you will quickly notice the improved behaviour of the opponents.

If you thought they were right bastards before, you’re in for a rude awakening. They will smash you flat, as though you were a new proposal for the Budget in Parliament. They drive so rotten that you will often get an archrival, which is a new addition to the gameplay.

If you get revenge on your rival, you’ll be rewarded with extra points. I’d have marked any other racing game down for this kind of AI behaviour, but Burnout has always been about road rage and bullying, so making the AI even meaner is actually a good move by Criterion.

Have you checked the traffic?

One of the new things in the streets of Burnout is the concept of traffic checking. For the first time in the series, you can now hit the regular traffic without crashing, instead of just your opponents. This makes new things possible, and certainly makes life easier when you’re slipstreaming behind an opponent.

You no longer have to be extremely careful not to hit the regular traffic – you can actually use it to your advantage this time. The right side of the road is safer because of this, but you can also block your opponents with the wreckages of innocent cars. Don’t hit lorries or buses though – they’re quite a bit more solid than yourself, so beware.

I’m not really sure that I like traffic checking, but in the end, it’s a matter of taste, and as always, sending things smashing into each other looks quite fabulous in the Burnout universe.

A bang-up job

The other important part of Burnout: Revenge, is the ever-popular Crash Mode, which has almost become synonymous with the series. It’s kind of like billiards, only with cars, and lots of them. You smash your vehicle into heavily trafficked areas, and see how much havoc you can cause. The more damage you inflict, the more points you get. And you get to see it all in glorious slow motion afterwards, so you can enjoy every part of the destruction in great detail.

A new feature in the game is the golf-game inspired three-way click system that you use when starting your car. You need to press buttons at the right intervals. If you do this too soon, the car will start the race at a snail’s pace, and if you’re too slow, you will send the engine right through the bottom of the car.

The so-called Crash Breakers have also been changed slightly. In the last game, you could detonate your car a second time once you had wrecked a sufficient number of other road users. This is still the case, but this time around, you must quickly mash the B button in order to achieve the biggest explosion. Subsequently, you can still use the Aftertouch system to steer your flaming wreckage into even more innocent victims.

Heavy metal destruction

Graphically, Burnout: Revenge is absolutely one of the most impressive titles ever to grace my Xbox. Forza Motorsport may have more detailed car models, and Project Gotham Racing 2 did sport more impressive city environments, but none of this is really essential to the visual side of Burnout: Revenge.

This is a game of high-speed aesthetics, where shapes and colours combine to form a supersonic speed blur of impressive proportions. To put it mildly, it’s incredible how fast and fluidly Burnout: Revenge runs on the Xbox.

Sadly, the sonic department is not really up to speed. It’s not bad per se, it would just have been nice to hear some beefier engine sounds, seeing that you’re always driving at maximum revolutions. Most of the cars I tried sounded like big sewing machines, and this got on my nerves quite quickly.

On the other hand, the crashes sound amazing – the deep bass will almost blow your subwoofer to pieces as well. The positional audio is equally well done, and the general impression is very positive.

I’ll have that license, please

Burnout: Revenge is truly a good game, just like its predecessor. But this is also a problem. Even though Criterion has declared that this is no sequel in the classic EA tradition of incremental improvements, in which every new iteration of a series just features a handful of new player names, for instance, this Burnout does still look awfully familiar.

Even though there’s a new, fancy interface (with decreased user friendliness, we have to admit), more finely tuned gameplay mechanics and a better AI, I can’t help feeling that there’s a bit of a lack of good ideas in comparison with Burnout 3. Granted, we’re expecting a lot from Criterion, it has proven itself the master of this racing genre, but Burnout: Revenge does feel a little too familiar at times.

This means that I have to award the game with the biggest 8 I have given in a long time. Burnout: Revenge is impeccable craftsmanship, it just lack the freshness of its predecessor.

This does not change the fact that few games have managed to achieve the wonderful blend of speed, thills and destruction found here. If you already own Burnout 3, you might have to try before you buy, but otherwise, Burnout: Revenge is about as exciting as extreme racing games get.

Source: Boomtown Denmark
English version by: Jonatan A. Allin (neonwolf)