"Another quality game from Sonic Team"

Sonic Team developed two games during the Saturn era that would make for possibly two great sequels for Dreamcast, one of them being Nights, the other? Burning Rangers of course!While a sequel would be cool, you might want to see if you like Burning Rangers first because it does suffer from a few problems.

The game takes place in the future and you have two new recruits to choose from: Shou and Tillis, who both have a reason for joining the Burning Rangers Task Force.Once you choose your character, you will meet the rest of the team and will proceed to train to learn the basics of fire fighting.This is where you learn how to control your character and weapon as best as you can while faced with obstacles that you must deal with.Once you get started, you will learn how important crystals are.They are just like the gold rings from Sonic the Hedgehog, as long as you have some, you won't die.You must also collect as many crystals as possible because you will have to rescue people in each level, which requires 10 crystals to rescue one person

The sound probably stands out the most from anything else. From the low whistle right before an explosion is set to happen, to the music and voices, everything is well done and is a strong point in the game. Kudos to Sonic Team for making a game with such great detail to the sound.

The gameplay is another great part of the game. Jumping from platform to platform, doing back flips to avoid the flames coming out of no where, shooting the flames with your futuristic (water?) gun, swimming in water to get to another part of the building, gliding over a huge gap to get the other side of the room. Burning Rangers (BR) isn't lacking in the game play department at all.

The graphics are both a plus and minus. The levels are very colorful and well designed but very pixilated. This might be from the graphic limitations of the Saturn but whatever the case may be, it's not always a pretty site to see. The anime cut scenes look great and are something to look forward to after each level. An update of the game would do justice to the graphics of BR and would improve an already good game.

The control is pretty good. You don't have to worry about button combinations or anything along those lines. The training mode is where you will learn how to perfect your moves and it even shows you what buttons to use for the moves. Jumping might be the only frustrating part of the control, jumping platform to platform, then over jumping the next and falling all the way down to the bottom is pretty annoying when it happens more than a few times.

The only negatives about this game are the number of levels and the camera. This game is really short, only 4 levels! Each level is somewhat large but only having 4 levels is disappointing. The camera is a big problem during some parts of the games. You can control the camera with a button but it's not always helpful. Being in a small area with flames all around you with only one way off getting out, the camera causes problems and more than likely will your crystal count will be dropping fast.

Overall, it's a good game to add your library or collection of Saturn games. At what price though is somewhat of a gray area. You might pay a good price just to get the game but because it's short you might feel you have over paid for the game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/07/01, Updated 08/07/01