E3: Burnout Revenge Hands-On

Insurance rates rise, crashing is increasingly attractive.

It's a good thing to crash a car. Burnout Revenge, the fourth installment in Electronic Arts' arcade racing series delivers this simple statement to its fullest meaning, never missing a beat in its almost blinding cacophony of metal that twists and warps at high velocity.

Burnout Revenge is, in essence, what drivers always want to do. Move at exceptionally high speeds before speeds before smashing into solid objects, reducing ones multi-million dollar vehicle into scrap.

Like the previous three installments, Revenge puts emphasis on pick up and play rather than the tedious and detailed customization options of similar racing titles. If one can operate a controller, one can crash, and crashing has never looked better.

Unlike the last release, Burnout 3, Revenge has fewer moving obstacles that can instigate the crashing process. The two master impediments of course being oncoming traffic and larger vehicles (such as trucks, buses, and RVs), as well as the typical stationary objects such as walls, corners, signs, certain lamp posts, and so on.

The flow of traffic moving in your direction is no longer a problem as smaller sized vehicles can be shoved aside quite easily, thus adding more of a racing quality rather than destruction derby free-for-all. Some might find this to be less of a challenge (indeed it is quite simple in single player mode) while others will find it refreshing to be able to maneuver around the same car in the same lane, which is rather helpful when trying to goad opponents into the cement during multiplayer modes.

Of course this much tighter selection of obstacles is not the only improvement to the racing engine. Revenge's predecessors suffered from very linear courses, in an effort to help players avoid the things on the road that should not be there. Now that these obstacles have been improved upon, the courses themselves have also received modifications. Gone are the straight-line roads, replaced with winding super highways packed with curves, detours, and shortcuts.

All of this adds up to the new gimmick of Revenge Mode, in which the objective is to catch up to one's racing enemy and forcing this opponent into a horribly gnarled wreck. Not surprisingly, this totaled vehicle will be placed back into the game, magically unscathed, and becomes the hunter in an attempt to exact 'revenge'.

This new competitive mode of play, combined with fixes for all of the little nuances of previous installments, is a vain attempt at producing more active online play. Burnout 3 being the only other game in the series with Xbox Live support, EA hopes to make up for lackluster involvement with this edgy new twist to the racing genre.

Whether the continuation of the purely arcade racer title will be successful is hard to gauge. Perhaps the gap should simply be connected to create one game with great customization options as well as heavy hitting impact physics. Perhaps not. We'll see when Burnout Revenge hits store shelves this year.

Greg Thompson
Contributor, Kikizo Games