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Mark Simons
00/12/0000
Burn through the packed city streets in this racer FROM Criterion.
Whilst Gran Turismo 3 offers a great driving experience it has to be said that it is a touch on the sterile side. Sure itās great when youāre hugging the corners getting your braking just right, feeling the back end go and then correcting it. However itās when you crash into other cars at high speed or go head on into a wall at a couple of hundred kilometres an hour and, well, nothing happens. The only danger is that you will slow down, you need not worry about your car, itās perfectly okay. This does not affect the game much, but it leaves you longing for a game whereby you can race these glorious cars in much more risky scenarios, like in the moviesā¦
Enter Criterion with Burnout and all the things you wanted to do in Gran Turismo 3, but couldnātā¦ Itās checkpoint based racing through cities, complete with civilian traffic, right there you know this is going to be a little different. It seems that Burnout is a fusion of the best things of games like Thrill Drive, Need For Speed ā“ on the 3DO, Outrun and in some respects, Destruction Derby.
Your aim is to win races, simple, and the races would be rather simple if it were not for the quite literally hundreds of civilian cars that populate the tracks. With great artificial intelligence and fully working road system you will have to weave your way through rush hour traffic being careful to not write off your car. However if you come close to totalling your car, well, then the game cuts to a slow motion replay, just to show how damned close you were to wrecking it. If you do wreck your car you get to see that in slow motion too. Because these cars are not licensed, rather based on, or āinspiredā by real models, they can take as much damage as Criterion see fit.
You cannot however simply damage your car as much as you want and get away with it, no, in a nod to Metropolis Street Racer you have a score calculated for you after you finish the race. Near misses, drifting and high speeds get you points, whereas damage, especially to more expensive cars (each has an insurance rating) will get you a bad driver score, not good. This adds up to make Burnout feel fresh and invigorating taking MSR to the next level with a good sprinkling of other influences, the games mentioned earlier as well as movies such as Roninā and The French Connection. With courses spread about over the US, Europe and Asia there will be a lot to see, and with the size of the levels there will be a lot to do.
Even when calculating the movements of 300 cars per frame Burnout still manages to look pretty damned good, the car models are detailed, and crumple nicely. Whilst the levels are similarly detailed with good use of textures and lighting, and of course the civilian vehicles all help make the game more immerse. In some cases it is possible to go past 1000 to 1500 cars a lap, this game must be set during rush hour. Criterion are quite obviously getting to grips with the PlayStation2 hardware, getting it do what it is good at, drawing polygons, and lots of them.
