Burnout 3: Takedown

"Pure Adrenaline-Racing, Burnout-tastic!!!"

Intro
Well, it's the 3rd game in the series, this is what most petrol-heads have been waiting for. I've played and completed the previous Burnout games, all gold all cars unlocked, crash modes done etc, now what can be said of the latest iteration? Read on...

Visuals
First impressions, presentation-wise it's abit like a Need for Speed, for those who don't know, EA has brought Criterion out so similarities to EA's previous menus and screens are strikingly similar.

Graphically it's very nice, I wouldn't say it is as good/detailed as PGR2 physics-wise but for crash-physics it's what Criterion are masters of so top marks for that. Crashes this time round has the cars fully deformable than ever, from bumpers, side doors, exhaust pipes, mirrors, etc etc the list goes on, they are all breakable.

Audio
The music is very EA style, ie. lots of rock soundtracks, it reminded me of Road Rash on PS1, luckily it has Xbox's unique custom soundtrack option, so you can race to your fave tunes! :) The custom music option is under the "Controllers" setting in EA Games Trax and not in the audio settings strangely enough. The volume balance in the custom musics is just right, as most ripped music tend to be low-sounding for some reason, in this case it's done properly I'm glad to say. One minor note tho, you have to select the custom music each time as it is not saved to your profile...

Gameplay
There are loads of modes and differing events to uncover as you progress in the game, crash modes have been revamped with lots of bonus icons scattered around the area, lots of cars to unlock, paintwork, bonus cars etc - getting gold is the main incentive to getting all the goodies and it can consume a lot of time in trying, that's the beauty of Burnout 3, longevity.

As for the new aggressive/take down racing, well the opponents were pretty nifty in the previous games but this time round the AI is much more improved, it's as if they were human players racing against you, they slam, nudge, grind and shunt you all the way, everything you can do, they can do the same to you! This is were Burnout 3 excels in this department, for once CPU opponents which are equally as aggressive as you, plus the fact that they'll remember how you took them down and will take revenge - there are avenge, revenge points to indicate this, highly satisfying.

Along with the take downs there is a new feature of the crash "Aftertouch", when you crash you can slow down the motion and initiate aftertouch, this gives you control of your car for around 10 seconds or so, this is a great feature as you can position your car and tag other drivers as they race by, hence you will get more pile-ups and points!

Difficulty-wise, it depends how good you are at racing games, for me it was pretty straight forward, the speed is blindingly fast initially but once you get used to it you can actually just concentrate the racing more - i found the racing events such as road rage, face-off pretty easy. The more difficult events are the crash events, trying to gain that all important gold medal can take a lot of attempts to get right but definitely pays off in the end.

There is more diversity to the game now as racing and crash events are mixed together in world tour mode so if you tire of racing everytime you can just select a crash event that has been unlocked to break things up abit, a nice touch - for me i tend to concentrate on the racing first then go back to do all the crash events :)

There are a few more niggles with the game, which game doesn't? - Such as the camera view when you've initiated the aftertouch, you can't turn/pan the camera around to see what cars are coming behind you, at times it can be a bit of hit-and-miss. There aren't any replays to view the race or indeed the crashes again, there are replays in crash events only but the replay is the same view as you played in the game, previous Burnout games had the camera replays in differing directions and angles of the impact so you can see it from all viewpoints. Crash replays not saveable, so when you've finally attained that gold medal, all that hard work can't be savoured, either it was time or technical constraints, only Criterion knows.

Overall
Nice fast and colorful graphics (not stretching Xbox's graphical powers but does the job very nicely indeed, definitely wouldn't look out of place of an arcade), its blindingly fast speeds coupled with aggressive opponents that really do give you a good challenge, lots of bonus cars, modes, events and specials to unlock (over 170), this will last you a very long time! :)

Warning: Make sure to have a rest from time to time as you can get achy-fingers! (using the standard Xbox gamepad default setup) :p

8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/10/04