Burnout 3: Takedown

Every so often, a game comes along that completely redefines its genre. We’ve seen it before with the likes of Halo, Pro Evolution Soccer, Tekken and the like, and now its time for arcade racers to get a kick up the backside. We knew that Burnout 3: Takedown would be good, but a perfect ten wasn’t looking so likely after the last two titles in the Burnout series were good, but failed to match up to the hype that was generated for them by the industry. So exactly how good is the third in this particular trifecta’

Burnout 3 brings a whole host of new features to extend the party, such as the one hundred or so crash junctions that are available, the new ‘Road Rage’ and ‘Eliminator’ modes, co-operative and combatative crash modes, online play complete with leaderboards and tournaments, forty four licenced tracks from some fairly decent bands including the excellent Jimmy Eat World and a massive single player career mode, entitled ‘Burnout 3 World Tour’ – which allows you to race on tracks in Europe and the Far East, as well as the USA-based affairs that we’re all used to from the previous titles in the series.

And the speed never lets up. Even in the compact cars that you start out with, the feeling of speed that Burnout 3 provides is second to none. No game has felt faster, no game has provided such an adrenaline rush and no game has provided such pant-wetting tension as when you’re neck and neck with the leader on the finishing straight when trying to beat a challenge that you’ve failed at the last ten attempts.

The major new feature is announced by the title. In earlier iterations of the game, the computer AI would rarely even acknowledge your existence, let alone try to ram you off the road. In Takedown, should you be getting a little browned off at the leader in a race, slam him into a wall and watch as the game slows down into ‘Impact Time’ and the camera swings to view his demise, before seamlessly refocusing on your car and speeding up to the ton-up speed that you were doing at the time. Fancy more’ Try a ‘Double Takedown’ or a ‘Signature Takedown’ – they all get marked off of your ‘Takedown Targets’ card at the end of the race, and when you’ve completed all of the targets in a section, you get a trophy.

Also new is the method of unlocking cars. Sure, you can unlock new vehicles by winning races, but also accumulating damage dollars at crash junctions and upping your takedown count will allow you some new toys to play with. You’ll barely notice this happening as you play through the World Tour though, since you’ll be too busy trying to beat the 170 plus challenges that lay before you in the form of tournaments, challenges, face offs, time attacks and crash targets.

But we couldn’t let the review go by without mentioning ‘Crash Aftertouch’. Aftertouch can be applied when you end up wrecking your vehicle and other racers are coming through. Hold down the ‘A’ button to enter Impact Time mode, then steer your wreck with the thumbstick and try to take your opponents out. In addition to the new ‘Crashbreaker’ feature (explode your car by pressing the ‘B’ button) that has been introduced to the crash mode, this can be most handy. The new multipliers and cash bonuses at the crash junctions also help out immeasurably.

Aesthetically, Burnout 3: Takedown is pretty. No slowdown or popup at this sort of pace makes you wonder why some snail-like FPS titles manage to have both in abundance. Sparks fly, metal grinds, parts fall off the cars and it all looks stunning. When you put this together with the aforementioned soundtrack and the ‘Crash FM’ radio presentation, you have a package that couldn’t really be more complete.

So in short, the answer to the question I posed a few hundred words ago is ‘astonishingly good’. Burnout 3: Takedown takes the classic-in-the-making that was Burnout 2, adds a huge chunk of that trademarkable Electronic Arts polish, mixes in a whole stack of new features and then throws it out of the screen and into your face. This is pure, balls-out speed that will cause even the most hardcore of gamers to rock from left to right as they barely miss ramming a truck at two hundred plus miles an hour. Racing games are ten-a-penny these days (as they always have been), but you could safely trade in every quirky, bland, adrenaline-less title that you’ve ever owned (the previous Burnouts included) for one copy of Burnout 3 and not feel short-changed. An essential title in every sense of the word.