Burnout 3 Takedown: A Good Idea Burned Out

Author's Rating:

Pros: good action, great premise, great sense of speed, good online support

Cons: needs better damage model, no customization, bad AI, aftertouch is boring, a one trick pony

The Bottom Line: 
This game could be so much more.

Author's Review
Burnout 3 Takedown is based on a great premise. Many times I found myself bumping my opponents in the Grand Turismo games only to be penalized for it in the end. The contact among other cars is what really appealed to me, not hitting the apex of a curve using the proper acceleration techniques. When the gameplay combines with a pure sense of speed, this game should be a guaranteed winner right? Well, we all know what happens when it's stated like that.


Modes

One of the most popular modes is Crash mode. You start by racing down a stretch of roadway in an attempt to cause a huge accident. You're measured by how much damage you cause. The bigger the vehicle you cause to wreck, the more damage points you get. Adding another element of strategy is the crashbreaker, which allows you to blow up your car on command, thus causing more damage at the right time. I liked this mode because it's short and easy to replay and it takes a lot of patience and practice to really nail a huge score. Still, it also is one mode that doesn't have a lot of replay value once you achieved a very high score.

Road Rage mode is by far one of the best modes of the games. It's not really a race, but instead you run lap after lap through a race track trying to takedown your opponents over and over. Your Road Rage session is over once you get taken down a few times. While this mode is great, it does reveal a few flaws in the gameplay. First, I was able to perform 5 times as many takedowns without using my nitro boosts. There's something wrong when a game that emphasizes raw speed rewards your player more for being the tortoise. Another gameplay flaw revealed in this mode is how robotic the crashes were. It's just way too easy to takedown your opponent, and only after about 30 takedowns (or one run in Road Rage) the crashes began to repeat themselves.

The meat of the game is the World Tour campaign mode. This is where you traverse a wide open world of locations to either race or crash your car. The more gold medals you earn through spotless racing or crashing opens up more locations. Overall there are tons of tracks, cars, and races that open up over the course of playing Burnout 3 which really adds to the replay value. Once committed to this mode, it really is a basic but fantastic premise to keep people interested in the game. Even when a player runs through most of this mode, they will be pretty familiar with this game and have unlocked many new cars, tracks, and features.

Multiplayer offers many of the same modes as offline with some variations. For instance you can play team road rage where teams of cars try to take out the opposing team instead of every person for themselves. Online overall is pretty fun. You get all the typical features of an online EA game, which also adds to the online experience.

One of the things that really irked me is that this game is almost all about the unlockables. It's really kind of useless to rent this game if you're purpose is to play with a friend or sibling for the night. This is because in the beginning you only have one car, one track, and one mode to play multiplayer. That mode isn't a split-screen simultaneous racer, but rather a sequenced crash mode. Unlocking these new tracks and multiplayer modes sometimes are not as easy as simply winning a race either. While I think unlockables are good, you should have most of the multiplayer game modes available from the beginning. Burnout 3 in this regard just isn't a very good game for a multiplayer rental night.


Gameplay

Burnout 3 is like Need For Speed where wrecking is your goal. This premise is something which isn't as exploited as much as it should. For the gamers who cannot full get into Gran Turismo and Forza Motosport, for many of us it's because you just want to pull a PIT maneuver on your opponent as he goes into that first turn. Burnout 3 lets you smash your opponents as much as you like.

The racing model is pretty decent. The game really gives you a great sense of speed, especially when you add in the nitro boosts in the game. Your nitro boosts are determined by your ability to wreck the other player and closely dodge traffic. If you play it safe, you won't get much nitro, but if you bang around your opponent and play chicken with oncoming traffic, then you'll have a lot of juice in the tank.

The model of aggressive driving, while good, still isn't as legendary as it should be. While two paragraphs earlier, I railed on Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport for being "too real" for us aggressive driving casual racing gamers, Burnout 3 isn't real enough. Too many times, it feels as if the cars on on a track and trying to perform a PIT maneuver at high rates of speed is simply too tough. While it shouldn't be too easy, the ability to smash your opponent is a little too restrictive and thus you'll find many repeat takedowns. This is where I'd recommend sliders to tweak this a little bit. While many gamers swear never to use them, they are useful for tweaking the game into a product that you cannot put down.

Burnout 3 features many types of cars in several different classes. The bad part is that their authentic names aren't available. Instead you're left to guess what the Make of the car is based on its size, shape, and grill. What's more is that once the cars are unlocked, there isn't anything more you can do with them. No custom paint jobs, no excessively large spoilers on the back, no spinny hubcaps. Now I'm not one to get into car customization, which makes it that much more appealing to trash someone else's setup while pounding the crap out of mine.

One of the featured aspects of Burnout 3 is the aftertouch takekdowns. Aftertouch allows you to control your car in slow motion during a crash in order to take down other cars, or swerve into traffic. While this feature sounds good on paper, it's implemented pretty poorly. First, the aftertouch is takes place way too slowly. While you can release the right trigger button to return the action to normal speed, other problems prevent you from doing that. One such problem is that there's one static camera angle doing aftertouch mode. This camera angle prevents you from checking to see if any racers or other traffic is coming up on you. So you don't know whether to continue with the aftertouch mode or to release the trigger and continue. This slows down the game way too much. Besides this problem, aftertouch simply doesn't translate to anything most of the time.

After playing so many Dreamcast games lately, I've gotten a better perspective on how a console should approach arcade-style games. EA doesn't really follow that model too well with regard to the gameplay. While for all intents and purposes, Burnout 3 is an arcade game, it isn't a true arcade experience. Outside of racing it lacks that visual flair and speed in the menu system. During the race, like a hug that lasts just too long, the aftertouch just slows down the experience just a tad too much.


Controls

I was pretty satisfied with the controls. The steering is pretty loose for a driving game, but it still allows you to pull off some pretty sweet moves in traffic. The aftertouch activation is on the same shoulder button as the nitro boost. While it conveniently and automatically activates if you're holding the button, you might miss a good aftertouch scenario if you aren't using your nitro at the time of impact.

The basic model of a face-button based acceleration and braking system is my favorite. Burnout does it well here to the point where when combined with the white knuckled racing can cause a lot of blisters on your hand, an experienced missed in fast-paced action gaming today.


Graphics

The graphics were pretty decent for a PS2 game. Burnout 3 really gives you a great visual sense of speed without losing framerate in the process. While EA's graphics aren't as detailed as other companies, the decent framerates make for better gameplay in my opinion. Burnout 3 is a great example of that.

That being said, the car models aren't very detailed and take on a generic look. Some of that blame can be directed towards car companies that seem to share the same mold when it comes to car design, EA's car models really lack a lot of detail and look very compact and stocky compared to their real world counterparts.

Visually, the car damage model is very generic. While it's acceptable for cars in this racing genre to take a lot of visible damage, your car seems to look the same after a long damaging race. I like to see deformed cars, but EA needs to get a little more creative on how many different deformities a car can take on while trying to ram opponents off the road.

The backgrounds and racing tracks look pretty decent. I think this genre does a fantastic job of setting great environments for racing. My biggest gripe with the environment is that it doesn't take damage. If you wrap your opponent around a tree or send them careening into a building, those objects don't take any damage. So the backgrounds are like a bimbo, pretty to look at but no substance behind it.


Sound

The soundtrack is rehashed music from other EA Games like MVP Baseball and Madden. The music just doesn't really fit the model of an arcade racer. To make things worse, these are songs that I have already adapted to other EA Sports games. It's clear that EA cut some major corners in signing musical talent inside Burnout 3. In this case, you're probably best left to getting the Xbox version because it allows for custom soundtracks.

The sound effects are decent. The engine sounds pretty generic, but not over the top. Most of the sound effects jump out at you which really coincides well with an arcade racer. While it's clear that not a lot of detail was put into varying the sound effects, the collection that resides in the game provides a decent atmosphere for Burnout 3's gameplay premise.


Replay Value

There isn't as much replay value in this game as you might think. While it's fun to cause your opponents to wipe out or nudge them into oncoming traffic, the game does get stale pretty quickly. The repetitive crashes, the flawed aftertouch mode, and many uninteresting gameplay modes really caused me to put this game down pretty quickly. There just aren't as many dynamics in this game as their could have been. The lack of customization really makes this game even more disappointing. If EA isn't going to put authentic car brands in this game, it could have really opened the door for more customizations to these mock models. I could imagine getting much more enjoyment out of the game if the car damage could impact your opponents. For instance if you get bumped on the side, the impact could have caused a jagged point which you can use to sever your opponent's tires or spear them into another car or wall. Imagine that huge spoiler on the back of your car falling off only to cause an opponent to go spinning into oncoming traffic. I would have also liked to see some sliders that control the road friction or the traffic congestion. While the game does have some modes which really can foster a good environment to enhance the game's replay value, it's the gameplay that causes the game to really lose its appeal quickly.

While I have to give EA credit for developing a game like this, it really isn't in the stage it should be given this is its third iteration. With Burnout 4 Revenge already just around the corner, I doubt that anything more will be done to really advance the formula. Personally, when it comes to releasing my road rage after a long commute this game doesn't do the trick. I'd rather play one of the Destruction Derby games or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. While those games do not have the same level of computer AI or depth as Burnout 3, they are much more satisfying. I like the sense of speed that Burnout 3 brings to the table, but the game grows boring much quicker than I thought. Look for Sega's Full Auto title due out this fall to really surpass the Burnout series in the arcade racing genre.