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Review: Burnout 3 - Takedown
from the things-that-go-fast-fly-far dept.
- Title: Burnout 3: Takedown
- Developer: Criterion Games
- Publisher: Electronic Arts
- System: Xbox
- Reviewer: Zonk
- Score: 9/10
Let me say something straight off: I don't play racing games. I don't play sports titles in general. My enjoyment of Burnout 3: Takedown stems from the fact that it is only a racing game in the loosest sense of the term. What Criterion has done with this title is to make racing incidental to the purpose of the game. The purpose of Burnout 3 is twofold: Go Fast and Hit Stuff.
Burnout's premise is that in racing "Risk = Reward", a catch phrase the radio-style announcer repeats often. The reward in this case is Boost, the game's consumable go-fast juice that increases your rate of travel from merely jaw dropping to truly ludicrous speeds. You obtain Boost by taking risks such as driving on the wrong side of the road, initiating near-misses with other vehicles, catching air, and skidding around corners. The primary way that you obtain Boost, and the way you increase the capacity of the Boost-meter, is through Takedowns.
Takedowns are awarded when you take
out another vehicle in a race. This can be accomplished in numerous ways, from grinding another car into a wall to
tail-gating him into crashing (called a "Psyche Out"). These Takedowns fill and expand your Boost meter, allowing you to go
faster and more effectively crash other vehicles. This leads to an amusing cycle of destruction that makes even a simple race
through the Italian wine country into a Mad-Maxian experience. When you are taken out (or kiss that oncoming pillar) you're
penalized some Boost, but the game rewards you for impressive flips and slides. Holding the Boost button post-crash allows you to view your explosive re-entry in Impact Time, a bullet-time-like slow-mo. Impact Time can even net you more Takedowns, called Aftertouches, as you direct your flaming heap into fellow racers. A Tony Hawk style breakdown of your crash
("Into Truck + Triple Somersault + 350' Sidewall Slide") can also net you some boost to refill your meter once you're
done crashing.
The key is that Takedowns and being taken out, rather than things to be avoided, are the core of the game. Great looking damage is applied to the (non-licensed) vehicle models, with shattering windshields and flying debris the norm for any given race. Unlike some racing games where a vehicle can be thrown off of a cliff without suffering a scratch at the speeds you move in Burnout 3 you can twitch wrong and blow apart your vehicle on a fencepost. The sense of movement and danger is conveyed through excellent graphics and extremely responsive controls.
The overall mood of the game is accentuated by the music selection. Like many sports games they've done lately EA has opted to include a selection of name-brand music with their title, allowing you to race to bands such as The Ramones, Jimmy Eat World, and Ash.
Beyond the basic building blocks of the game, Criterion provides you with a panoply of cars, tracks, and things to run into. Events are spread out over three areas: the US, Europe, and the Far East. Within these areas are several themed courses which allow you to experience high speeds in places such as the California coast, downtown Chicago, downtown Rome, and a busy Hong Kong street-maze.
I say events because straightforward races are just one of the activities you can find yourself completing in Burnout 3. Road Rage pits you against other cars in a challenge to take out as many opponents as you can in an allotted time. Timed laps force you to traverse a course under a certain time to prove yourself worthy the gold, silver, or bronze. And then, most deliciously, there is Crash Mode.
Crash Mode is the
stand out event type in the game as well as being the most straightforward. You start at the beginning of a course,
rev up to speed, and throw your vehicle into traffic. Your goal is to cause as much destruction as possible and rack up as
much damage as you can in dollar amount form. Spinning coin icons add to your totals and icons representing cash amount
multipliers float in challenging positions on the course. These add a strategy element into the wanton destruction of all
you see before you. This is accentuated again by Impact Time, which allows you to savor the metal crunching
results of your careful planning and permits you to guide your vehicle through the air.
A Hong Kong based track was host to a particularly memorable crash for me. After the countdown I sped out of the start, laying down rubber behind me. Looking ahead I saw the Boost icon coming up quickly. In Crash Mode there are icons that instantly fill your Boost Bar and as I sped through it my speedometer leapt from 115 up into the 160+ range. Other racing games say you're going that fast, but the presentation of Burnout 3 really reinforces the awesome speeds at which your vehicle goes. Boosting hard I aimed directly at the small ramp they'd thoughtfully provided just before the busy intersection I was heading towards. I launched off of the ramp and Impact Time took over, allowing me to see the huge tanker truck plowing through the intersection at high speed. The small coupe I was driving entered the tank of the truck just behind the cab from above in a fiery conflagration that shook the room. Impact Time quit and the now burning and blackened coupe flew upside down through the air into a pillar, taking out a pair of the tiny TukTuk cars so common in this area. As my coupe landed the camera pulls back to reveal the devastation in the intersection, where the tanker explosion has ripped open the frames of several small cars and caused a few others to slide over into the oncoming lane. Another truck, this one with a long trailer laden with boxes, slams hard into the wreckage and adds flying cargo to the confusing pile. At that point the camera swings back to my already burning wreck and informs me that if I hit the B button I'll be able to use the Crashbreaker. After a certain number of wrecks are accumulated in a Crash Mode session, you're allowed to effectively detonate your vehicle to add more burning metal to the experience. This explosion also allows a second go at Impact Time and can be the key to hitting out of the way points icons. Always willing to destroy things, I hit B and with an explosive *wham* my vehicle goes from a burning cinder to a rapidly expanding vapor cloud. The largest chunk is the one I have control of and I guide it through the air with my control stick directly into a score multiplier icon, netting me a huge amount of cash.
Moments like these accumulate more lasting rewards as the game plies you with an endless string of medals, trophies, new cars, and (most amusingly) headlines in the newspaper. You can specifically go for these rewards but I found during the course of play that cool things(tm) would just organically happen, netting me accolades as a byproduct to my fun.
Beyond this rich tapestry of
single player speed hedonism, the game is fully Xbox Live compatible. Though there aren't hundreds of games available like
you'd find with Halo 2 there are still plenty of Burnout 3 players to be found on the service. Online games come in many different flavors, from straight matches to series of races, time trials, crash contests, and battle races where one team
tries to take out the other team before they reach the finish line. The Xbox Live service does the game full justice with
very little lag and extremely tight response.
The only complaint that I can offer up is that the game is extremely to the point. There isn't a create your own racer mode or any building features for the vehicles you're offered. It's a small thing, though, as Burnout does what it does very very well. I highly recommend this game to speed lovers, Hot Wheels aficionados, and anyone who has found themselves on a go-kart track saying "Maybe I'll give him just a tap."
Screenshots are from EA's official Burnout 3 site, ©2005 Electronic Arts Inc.
But... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.realistic-dragon.co.uk/)
Great, simple controls... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Great, simple controls... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.emprecords.com/)
I haven't seen the xbox version, but the PS2 version in progressive scan mode is pretty damn nice, too...
I hear that the xbox live online experience is much better than the PS2 one. I can't imagine it's worse - random disconnects, timeouts, server-side connection problems, and listening to other players voices that sound like they are underwater... EA seems to have major problems running game servers. But when it works, man is it fun!
Here are some thoughts regarding Burnout 3 that I wrote a while ago, but aren't 100% finished. Sorry for the length:
===
Burnout 3 Beefs
===
by Mattcelt1 (currently ranked 98 out of 30,000 on PS2)
Here are the things I have found to be helps or hindrances when playing Burnout 3: Takedown. Before I begin, I should say that this game is incredible. It is a major enhancement over Burnout 2, but interestingly they've changed enough that BO2 is still fun to play for its own sake. In Burnout 3, the graphics are incredible, the playability is way up there, and the game is just difficult enough to make you nuts. For the first time ever, I actually hit my controller hard enough in frustration to break the vibrating unit inside. Not my finest hour. But I'll be the first to say that I should be frustrated by my own screw-ups, not because the game isn't working the way it should!
Keep in mind that despite my rants here, this is still one of the most fun games I have ever played, and that these problems I have do not keep me from racking up many, many hours of enjoyable play. What's more, the interesting thing is that in nearly all the instances, the things I recommend are interface changes, mostly cosmetic. That should speak volumes about the game itself - it's built on a solid core, and I have no complaints about the physics or the controls. Most of what I'm going to complain about is nitpicking; once these things are addressed, this game will be as close to perfect as possible. So now it's time to see what I'm on about.
The Camera:
By far the major offender in this game is the camerawork. I'm going to say this very loudly so that any passers-by from Criterion will hear it reverberating through the streets: HIRE A CINEMATOGRAPHER!!!! Seriously, put a cinematographer on your development staff and listen to what s/he has to say about the camera. The addition of 'aftertouch' in crash situations was a stroke of genius, and I love it. But a consequence of this great idea is that camera positioning, control, aiming, and zoom have suddenly become major factors in successful gameplay, where camera views were incidental at best in Burnout 2. Where they were once incidental windows into the action, the cameras are now integral to successful gameplay, and the lack of control makes them, frustratingly, a hindrance instead of a help.
There is something in film circles known as "crossing the line", the prohibition of which is the first rule taught to any cameraman. If there's a girl on the right and a boy on the left, you never, never, ever cut to another angle where their positions are switched (i.e., the girl is on the left and the boy on the right). It's the biggest sin you can commit in cinema. Yet Burnout 3 does it all the time. You're racing, you crash. You start to aftertouch, pressing left to try to take down the car you know is following you. Then all of a sudden, the camera swings wide in a 180-degree arc, and you find yourself moving away from the other guy, without ever lifting your finger off the stick! This is too frustrating for words.
The second time this rears its ugly head is during crash competitions. Most of the time I play single-player crash, I plan my crashes so that I get the 4x multiplier (or one of the other power-ups) during aftertouch. But with the camera jumping around from place to place, and even coming to rest on some far-off vehicle that's rocking back and forth on its
Also available on PS2 (Score:3, Informative)
That's weird... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/~Shadow%20Wrought/journal | Last Journal: Saturday November 17, @12:05PM)
Fun (Score:4, Interesting)
Admittedly, it gets a little hard at times, I wish there were ways I could just skip a certain point (or points) and progress and come back them later. It's all a checkpoint system, where if I beat certain maps then others are unlocked.
Especially cool is the way the graphics blur when you hit turbo. The soundtrack gets old, the announcer is boring and very irratating. I still haven't figured out how to get the custom soundtracks working...perhaps someone could enlighten me.
This game will almost certainly have you hooked for weeks or more.
Re:Fun (Score:4, Informative)
Put an audio CD into your xbox, and go into the audio menu, copy all of the tracks to it's own album. It'll copy them over, rinse and repeat with as many cds as you want. Once you have all of your music on the xbox hard drive, you can create a new album, and copy over all of the appropriate driving songs into it. Label that album burnout3 or something appropriate.
Once in the game, go into your profile section, then to settings, there should be an option that says EA TRACKS. You can change the sound track of the game from the one that they give, to any of your albums, including your custom burnout3 one.
Noises (Score:3, Funny)
I played with Hot Wheels when I was a kid, and made lots of noises, but "psshhhh-kapoooo!" was not one of them. What the hell is that supposed to represent, anyway?
EA-published title (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.fahrvergnugen.net/)
All those people who decry the inhuman working conditions at EA, it's time to put your money where your mouth is. Stop rewarding their deplorable labor practices with your dollars.
Re:EA-published title (Score:4, Insightful)
All those people who decry the inhuman working conditions at EA, it's time to put your money where your mouth is.
But EA didn't develop this game, Critereon did. EA just published it, which doesn't involve any inhuman working conditions.
For PS2 also (Score:3, Informative)
It's a great game none the less.
A warning to burnout 2 players... (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 09 2006, @07:45PM)
These 2 wheels allowed us to race against each other in Burnout 2, which is the ONLY thing we ever did.
In Burnout 3, these 2 wheels do NOT work. Only one works. I AM LIVID.
What the fuck is EA doing? Removing hardware support from previous versions? Trying to participate in a conspiracy to get us to spend another $150 on steering wheels?
If anyone has ANY information on how to get 2 wheels working, I'd love to hear it.
Re:*yawn* (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.nodecam.com/)
As to how many courses - I haven't bothered to count, but there are probably a dozen true courses that you play in various configurations, taking different turns, going different directions, etc. Lots of cars, though a lot of them play similarly.
As for replay though - don't worry about being bored with it after 6-7 hours, unless you don't likea arcadey adrenaline racers with spectacular crashes. Even then, it's probably worth a rental.
Does this review belong on the front page? Nope. It barely belongs on the Games page, since the game is so old.