Burnout Dominator

"This game was created to hate you"

Burnout 3 was one of my favorite games of all time. I played that thing until I got 100% and knew the ins and outs of every track and could win just about every time.

Burnout Revenge was an okay follow-up, held back by awful load times and glitches galore. Still, it was fun as hell to play (so long as you didn't vanish into the glitchy abyss).

Burnout Dominator is a horrid shell of a game, designed by Satan himself to convince you to kill yourself in a lackluster car accident that won't even make the news.

Okay, I'm exaggerating, but playing this game with an ironclad will to beat it because you loved previous games in the series will ultimately drive you mad, and possibly to kill.

What It's About
Burnout Dominator is a racing game that's just as much about crashing your opponents as taking the gold. There's no story, but it doesn't really matter. It's a fast-paced game designed to appeal to the kids in us who love to blow stuff up.

How It Plays Out
Controls are simple: X to drive, square to brake or initiate drift, R1 to boost. Visuals are good as far as PS2 games go. There's a lot of cars available for use, though within the particular classes of cars, there's little variety and no obvious differences in performance. Driving at speeds in excess of 150-200 mph feels intense as your perception blurs and hurls you forward.

And that's about all the good things I can say about it. Let's start with what's missing: Crash Mode is gone, knocking same-direction traffic around is gone, exploding tanker trucks are still gone, bumper-to-bumper traffic is gone, acceptable load times are still gone. Boy is it ever noticeable. Crash Mode lagged in Revenge because of long load times, but it was still (usually) fun. Having nothing but racing in a game meant for over-the-top explosions feels like watching a fireworks display full of duds. The loss of traffic pinball is disappointing, but I suppose losing it was a way to cater to people wanting a more "realistic" explosive car racing game. There's a tanker truck in one or two levels of Dominator, but don't expect it to ever explode. The tricky traffic jams of Revenge are gone, replaced by two or three cars showing up on screen every once in a while. This time around, you're more likely to crash into a wall than a car, and that's just strange. And the load times--ugh. Why can't I hit "retry" and already retry? B3 had almost immediate retries, so why not this game? And why do I have to sit through every "movie" telling me of a car I can win? It's thirty seconds long, and all I want to do is race. Please, in the name of all that is holy, skip already so I can race!

Now let's talk about what's added. Aggravating camera angles. Why does the camera hate me? Any time you try to choose a car to use for a race or whatever, the camera frequently changes angles, trying to be all edgy or something, I suppose. You have to forcibly take control of the camera just to know what the hell car you're looking at. That's not edgy, it's irritating. Also, the camera picks its own direction to look after you've crashed, which can totally screw you up if you're looking for enemy cars to crash with Aftertouch or Crashbreaker. I'll explain these partially now: When you crash in a race, you can hold down R1 to slow down the action and try to maneuver your wreck of a car into your opponents, and if they get close enough, you can detonate your car to try and catch them in the explosion. This is useless when the camera is looking in completely the wrong direction.

Point-focused events. Boost, in this game and in previous, is gained by driving dangerously, which includes driving on the wrong side of the road, nearly hitting traffic, crashing opponents, drifting, and getting hang time. What's different this time is that there are events focused on how many "points" you can gain in a limited amount of time; specifically, Drift Challenge, Near Miss Challenge, Burnout Challenge, and Maniac Mode. That's points for drifting, points for near misses, points for consecutive burnouts (which I'll discuss more in-depth later), and points for everything, respectively. All of these, though to a less extent for Maniac Mode, are boring as hell. They're not fun, they're a chore. Thankfully they're usually easy. As long as you don't crash over and over and over in an event, you'll probably win. I imagine the average player won't even bother with these until they're trying to gain points to unlock new events. Maniac Mode is closer to being fun because it counts points for everything; still feels like a chore, though.

Shortcuts. This isn't new so much as tweaked. Revenge had takedowns that had to be performed in specific places to receive an award, and they were ungodly hard to perform at break-neck speeds. Dominator changes this to takedowns into barrier walls that reveal shortcuts that open any time you play this track in the future. Opening up a shortcut that's just for you is a great reward--provided you can make it happen. Opening the shortcuts seems easier than Revenges impossible takedown demands, but it still requires the AI opponents to be at the right place at the right time. Even worse, higher difficulty races can be downright infuriating without these cheat paths opened. Have fun trying to remember where these paths are, too, when you're flying at 200+mph.

Now for what's made a return. The glitches from Revenge are back. They aren't nearly as frequent or game ruining as before, but they have returned. On rare occasions, when you return to the track after a crash, you'll fall into an otherworldly abyss that will eat up your time before the game remembers to put you back on the road. Unlike in Revenge, where you could count on this happening every five rounds or so, I've only seen this happen twice in Dominator after playing for a few dozen hours. I think it's more likely to happen in multiplayer, which still plays as poorly as in Revenge (more on that later). It's also possible to be knocked through an invisible hole in the scenery and drop into the abyss, but at least this doesn't interfere with the gameplay. Another glitch which happens following a crash is an infrequent occurrence where the game drops you right in front of traffic, which you of course crash yet again into. Rare, but it's there. Another returning glitch has the game return you from “hey, you just crashed a guy” camera mode to being stuck in front of a median and having to drive in reverse until you can rejoin the race. Crashed traffic vibrates and disappears abruptly. Also returning from Revenge, the boost often doesn't notice you're holding the boost button when returning from “hey, you just crashed a guy” camera mode or after your own crash. This time around, though, it notices within about five seconds. The most disappointing glitch is one that should have been fixed following Revenge: you can still lose all your boost from trying to Crashbreak near the end of your crash. This isn't so much a glitch as it is a poor oversight by the game creators. Sometimes you can't even tell if you're close to the game dropping you back into the race, and you try to explode too late. Or maybe it is a glitch. You're still likely to frequently lose all your boost because the game hates you. The absolute worst and most unforgivable glitch in Dominator, though, is the completely broken Crashbreaker. What use to be the most fun part of races is now the worst. The idea behind the Crashbreaker is that, how much boost you have upon crashing affects how big the effect of your explosion is. That's the idea, anyway. This time around, you can have full boost or you can have no boost and it's still up to luck whether or not you kill everyone on screen or miss the guy driving right next to you. That's right: you can have full boost and sometimes still fail to explode your opponent who's practically touching you. You have about 3/4 of a chance of your Crashbreaker working at any given time, so if you depended on it in Revenge, you'll have an awful time playing Dominator. Yes, that's a lot of glitches, and the way this game plays, you'll suffer at least one of them every single event.

Boost Chaining. Apparently this was in Burnout 2, which is why it's “back.” Boost Chaining, or burnouts, work as thus: when you drive without boost, you gain boost as previously mentioned. While boosting, you don't continually gain boost like in B3 or Revenge. You can only boost and gain boost by waiting until your boost meter is filled first. That means that half the time you play any given event, you'll be driving at about 100mph while everyone else passes you. You'll feel like an idiot, too, seeing as how the game revolves around driving at ludicrous speeds. Winning revolves around keeping up a boost chain, though, for points and for races, but of course, driving at blurring speeds makes you more likely to crash, which means you have to start over, so on and so on. It's as awful as it sounds.

Road Rage and Eliminator. Thank goodness these events returned. Road Rage focuses on taking out as many opponents as possible within a time limit, and Eliminator is a different take on standard races, in which whoever is in last place is eliminated every 30 seconds. Personally, Road Rage is my favorite event, but Eliminator adds a little variety to the game.

Multiplayer. Still feels crappy like it did in Revenge. It's still fun when playing with the right people, but only if you're trying to have fun rather than being competitive.

Single Player non-story. Forgive the cruddy terminology. Revenge forced players to play the World Tour if they wanted to just pick up the game and play any event on their own, which made it pretty annoying any time you wanted to just screw around in your favorite level. Dominator brings back the freedom of playing any level in any event whenever you want. Kind of strange when you consider that a perk.

Now for everything else. The music has gotten worse. B3 had a pretty good soundtrack. Revenge had a forgettable soundtrack. Dominator puts glass in your ears and wonders why you aren't smiling. There's four--that's right--four versions of Avril's Boyfriend song. Not only do I hate that song, but I find it completely out of place in a racing game. Most of the other songs available are neither memorable nor appropriate. I only liked one song, and that's because I was familiar with it from SSX3. I turned off the music for when I play.

The AI is made of hate. Enemy cars are easy enough to race against in early events, but by the time you get to the last levels, you'll be lucky to see the tail-end of the 5th place guy. Also, traffic will occasionally aim for you. You can be driving to deliberately get a ‘near miss' from a traffic car and they might swerve into you, presumably in a misguided attempt to avoid getting killed.

You can't skip most movies. I briefly mentioned this before, but I cannot convey the shear degree of aggravation the movies will force upon you. Every time you play an event in which you have yet to unlock a car, a roughly 30-second-long movie will play to let you know the exact requirements to win said car. It's unrelated car footage with a static text message over it. And you can't skip it. And it's there every time until you win that car. Angst.

The tracks are awful. I liked the tracks of B3 and Revenge. Traveling across broken bridges and through congested mountains and so on kept you on your toes and made takedowns fun. Dominator's tracks seem to think that traveling Chinese towns populated by ten people and endless hairpin turns is fun. It's not. Half the game is spent drifting, or trying to drift and ending up scratching the railings. The other half looks like rehashes of levels from the previous games, and not good ones, either. Also, there's lens flares and smoke that makes seeing traffic and medians as hard as driving 200+mph in real life, and not in a fun way. Also, riding against those giant glowing barriers will occasionally crash you into a smidgen of a corner that the development team forgot to edit out. The only feature I thought was cool was driving through a toll booth in a single level, and that was done in Revenge. Yawn.

Why You Should Avoid It
Dominator is just an attempt to take your money until you buy Burnout Paradise on a next-gen system. By all means, buy Burnout Revenge, or better yet, buy Burnout 3 if you can find it. Both are much better games and frequently fun, unlike this abomination. Essentially, this game has been done and done better. Previous games in the series offer more variety and better physics and better game mechanics. Burnout 3 revolutionized the racing genre when it debuted several years ago; if it had been Burnout Dominator, Criterion Games might not be around anymore.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/16/08

Game Release: Burnout Dominator (US, 03/06/07)