| Burnout 3: Takedown review |
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Burnout 2: Point of Impact divided gamers thanks to its unforeseen preference
of pandemonium over unhindered speed. Criterion have been quick to point out
that, though many preferred the breakneck street-racing of the first game,
Takedown will enforce the series’ recent preoccupation with elaborate,
outlandish destruction. Credit due – the subsequent achievements are more than
enough to justify the decision. Takedown is the answer to all the subconscious
frustrations of Burnout 2; the fruitless grinds against rival cars, the vague
inertia that hindered offensive driving – all has led to this. As sequels go,
the pay-off is a rampage.
With dedicated expansion, the characteristic racing and crashing events now feel
both separate and impressive. Neatly integrated into a World Tour, the two
collaborate to provide an intimidating single player experience (try pursuing
over 170 gold medals and 67 cars before lunchtime). Races include standard
lap-based competition, single-stretch road races, head-to-heads, lap-by-lap
eliminations, grand-prix series, time-trials and the all-new ‘road rage’
Takedown event. Quite a selection, indeed. With the exception of time-trials
(that will certainly please original Burnout fans), it can’t be exaggerated how
much the Takedown has transformed the dynamic of the game. The once-suppressed
urge to batter your opponents has been transformed into electrifying reality.
As congratulatory as modern racing demands, the various Takedowns are an
eclectic, characterised bunch of truly extraordinary crashes. Opposing cars can
be ground, nudged and slammed into traffic, walls, scenery and each other; don’t
feel guilty - they’ll more than make the effort to return the favour. With each
of these and with every flourish of driving excellence come relative bonus
points and an on-screen acknowledgement. Additionally, Signature Takedowns occur
should you annihilate an opponent in an appropriate manner or at a specific
location. Then, atop it all, there are the Aftertouch Takedowns…
Aftertouch is a simple yet relentlessly attractive proposition should you pile
yourself into a car-unfriendly object. With a button-hold, players can now take
control of crashes as they happen; specifically, the trajectory of your car can
be adjusted in slow motion with the left analogue stick. The goal, of course, is
to see to it that none of your rivals take advantage of your mistakes, instead
taking it square in the face. An issue emerges here in that your Aftertouch
potential is often limited by the rigid movements of its camera. Ideally, the
game will switch to an elevated rear-view of the traffic as it catches up;
however, all too often, the view will be an awkward, tactically useless one
instead. You could defend this as a call to the predictive mind of the player;
however, the elements of road width and AI responsiveness make even moderately
accurate judgement of rival trajectories impossible.
Nonetheless, it’s this degree of innovation that has also transformed the crash
courses. The tour of crashes here is a more complex, rewarding test of strategy
and wits than before. Thanks to various ‘pick-ups’, the storyboard of a crash is
no longer predetermined by the way you kick things off. Multipliers either
double or quadruple your score, cash tokens otherwise increase it while
explosives send cars flying through the air in all directions. The
‘Heartbreaker’ will halve your score and, should you achieve a pre-defined quota
of collisions, the ‘Crashbreaker’ lets you detonate your own car to spectacular
effect.
With the potential for Aftertouch present throughout every crash, the
possibilities for score attacks speak for themselves. Scores tend to be so high,
in fact, that they easily eclipse the modest goals set by the World Tour. With
adherence to the golden rules of ‘always get the x4 multiplier’ and ‘never take
the easy option’, scores in excess of twice those required for gold are
commonplace. Furthermore, with over a hundred crash scenarios to complete, it’s
little surprise that things become somewhat familiar as you near the end; the
fixed paths of event icons, in fact, often impose a somewhat dampening
restrictiveness of their own. Single player objectives are clearly only the tip
of the grand design - the game’s multiplayer component has been given all the
attention it deserves. However, even then, things aren’t entirely simple.
In the long-run, this is a game built for online multiplayer. Supporting up to
six-player races and eight-player ‘party crashes’, the Live component is every
bit as exhilarating and aggressive as one would hope. Events are largely
identical to their single player counterparts, the exception being the Red vs.
Blue takedown chases that prove every bit as successful as they sound. Shame,
therefore, about the servers EA have inexplicably chosen as hubs for the whole
thing.
Tested at various times of day on multiple servers around the world, this online
assessment took place throughout the game’s UK launch day via a dedicated 1.5mb
connection. Though the game never once faltered while a race was in progress,
the repeat procedure of signing into the various servers was a complete
nightmare. Only at decidedly off-peak hours could a series of games be played
fluently and without hitch. At all other times, transitions between races became
a tense waiting game: will your rank successfully update? Will you rejoin your
friends without the server casting you into oblivion? Will your Xbox crash
entirely? In the course of a busy day, all three were commonplace.
Another concern is that of 60/50hz incompatibility. An understandable dilemma in
its own right, the detection of these conflicting modes seems hazy at best -
different users finding themselves barred from dubiously high and varied numbers
of games. During testing, friends lists proved consistently inaccurate, while
the reading of incoming mail would sometimes cause the game to hang. Quite why
EA chose to implement their Live support in this manner is a complete mystery;
however, the result is that this near-milestone of online gaming has become a
near-disaster of online engineering. Patches cannot come soon enough.
The split-screen Burnout 3 fares no better, coming off as a sad, laboured
concession to market demands. Aliased, reduced and capped at 30fps, this is but
a shadow of how the game is meant to be seen and played. Even with the benefit
of a 32 inch widescreen set, split-screen frequently proves infuriating to play,
primarily during patterns of heavy traffic. The menu of events is superbly
geared to party play; the technology, it transpires, is not.
As regards presentation, Takedown makes the same leaps and bounds the second
game made over the first. The liquid framerate, blistering velocity and humbling
detail that Burnout 3 provides is the kind expected from the next generation of
hardware rather than this one. Unless the game is paused and you take a moment
aside, you can’t hope to appreciate its full visual splendour. Each Takedown is
rendered in a sweeping, unobtrusive cutaway; each collision showers the air with
sparks; each crash tears the fully articulated car models into a hundred pieces.
See it for yourselves, because neither words nor screenshots can do it justice.
Though the much-loved ‘amplification’ that accompanied the burnouts in Point of
Impact has gone, there’s more than enough audio here to compensate. In Dolby
Digital, a crash is like a symphony of exploding glass and grinding metal. Cars
race past with an audible rush of air, tankers thunder as they belch flames
while the burnouts themselves are heavy, exhilarating roars. In a break from
EA’s dubious track record, the inevitable ‘EA Trax’ can be almost entirely
overridden by your own custom soundtracks. Good job, really – the default
playlist is typically fashionable and inappropriate. However, compared to the
in-game ‘DJ’, it’s Mozart reborn; the option to disable this ‘totally rad’
commentary is appreciated, the option to have the people behind it hanged from
the nearest tree has been sadly overlooked.
At the very least we can disable many of the grim additions that smack of EA’s
Johnny-High-Street mentality. In fairness, we can probably thank the publisher
for hankering the game’s dynamic new front-end into being: were another Burnout
game to have required a dozen button-presses to restart a race there would’ve
been doubtless justified murders. This hasn’t, though, precluded EA from filling
the game with countless billboards advertising their other products. One also
suspects that the game’s complete lack of configurable controls is somehow their
doing – inexplicably stubborn as it is.
Concerning additional flaws, Burnout 3 has its share but has an answer for many
of them. Take for example, the AI of rival cars and the general balance of races
– a balance some gamers may find unfair. Criterion have clearly integrated the
Takedown at great developmental expense and they expect you to use it. The
trademark ‘burnout combos’ have been supplanted by a new system – one that
intrinsically ties your NOX capacity in with your aggression towards other
drivers. It’s no longer optimum racing practice to simply drift, scrape and
thrust yourself around the course - if you want to steal the race from your
opponents then it’s down to you to remove them from it. This becomes apparent
when, after an otherwise perfect race, one crash sends you from a seemingly
unassailable lead right down to the back seat. Curiously, should you pull off a
near full race of faultless driving, suddenly this imposed handicap system
collapses – your lead over the opposition skyrockets. Yet more bizarre, even if
you crash at this point your lead will continue to increase; a glitch or some
obscure reward for top driving? Who knows?
Handicapping is a concession the game has knowingly made; it knows that amidst
its juggling act of elements and innovations, something’s got to give and so
long as skill is rewarded, it’s always better to err on the side of difficulty.
Were it any easier, the single-player game would arguably have been ruined.
Whether oversights or intentional rules, the game’s frustrations are palpable;
luckily, they’re incidental to the experience as a whole.
And what an experience it ultimately proves to be. Burnout 3 has turned an
obsession with high-speed destruction into a masterpiece. No idle sequel, no
mere upgrade, Takedown is nothing short of a declaration of war – a nosebleed
racer that's faster, angrier and more explosive than practically any video game
you’ve ever seen. Moreover, when the online dust clears, the scene as a whole
should be refreshingly short of casualties.
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System: Microsoft Xbox
Genre: Racing
Developer: Criterion
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Players: 1-8
Version: European
Reviewed: Aug 2004
Writer: Duncan Harris
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Pros:
- gorgeously detailed, stylish and evocative 60fps visuals
- a thundering soundtrack with excellent Digital support
- enormous single player challenge with difficulty to match
- an online riot
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Cons:
- there will be online riots if the netcode isn't sorted out
- split-screen performance is unpleasant at best
- crashes are very similar, easy and arguably outstay their welcome
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