It's fast, it's furious; more importantly it's a lot of fun...

The Burnout series has grown from strength-to-strength, resulting in the franchise being snapped up by EA from Acclaim, leading to high hopes of improved sales for the third title in the series.

In an attempt to place even more focus on the spectacular crashes featured within the game, Crieterion have expanded this aspect into the actual gameplay, allowing you to push your opponents into oncoming traffic or the nearby environment in what is known as a ‘TakeDown’. Successfully doing so grants you a slowed down replay whilst increasing the size of your Boost gauge. Boost is gained in the same way as previous titles, i.e. by driving like a nutcase, swooning in between on-coming cars, sliding around corners and catching air – at present we’ve yet to identify any new Boost tricks; however we’ll keep playing to make sure.

The finished game will feature a mightily impressive 70 vehicles to get your hands on, with some rumours suggesting that cars may not be the only wheels you’ll get to try out. As you’d expect from a game that places strong emphasis on crashes and an extensive damage model, the cars featured within Burnout 3 aren’t licensed, although they do bear a striking familiarity to certain models.

This time around certain crashes result in a message being flipped up onto the screen, such as roiling your car results in “FlipMode” flashing up; it’s likely that certain types of crashes earn the player more points, although we’ve yet to confirm this.

From a visual point of view, Burnout 3 is looking simply fantastic, sporting an impressive level of detail with a sense of speed that just has to be seen to be believed; in particular the crash replays are looking magnificent.

We’ll have more on Burnout 3 soon.