Burnout

Review - Burning the candle at both ends

Two words describe this game better than any others; complete lunacy. I’m not talking a silly game in the style of Wacky Races or anything like that, this game is just insane. It’s not so much the game’s image, but the way you have to play it. Allow me to explain.

Burnout first appears to be your run of the mill racing game, choose a car, choose a course and off you go. However, you soon realise that things are not quite right. The opposition streams ahead of you leaving you in their dust, no matter how flat out you drive, you can not get anywhere near the first place driver. Then, as you round a corner, you take it too wide… straight into the path of an oncoming taxi, you swerve, just missing the front of the cab by inches. You notice ‘near miss’ flashes up on screen and the bar at the top of the display has filled slightly. Hmmm…. You swerve between vehicles coming the opposite way, you overtake down the inside, you start taking stupid risks so that the bar fills up. The bar flashes red. It’s full. ‘Burnout available’ flashes. You press the R1 button. That’s when things start getting really dangerous, your little sports compact kicks out a wheel spin in fifth, the screen blurs, you start to reach maximum air speed velocity for an F-16 at little more than an inch off the ground. You hurtle towards a truck, you go to duck down the inside and WHAM! You smack right into the back of it, spinning your car in the air like some discarded toy. That’s insane.

Burnout must be the first driving game that I have played where the speed of your car is one of the least important factors. Handling and the car’s size are the most important, a huge muscle car is no good when a family compact can just duck through a gap you can’t. Likewise a huge engine is no good if you can’t control it and end up ploughing into fuel tanker. Small and nippy is the key. Of course big and brutish do have their place; normally last.

The graphics of Burnout are excellent. They are crisp and clear and hurtle along, with no sign of any slow-down. However, it’s the crashes that bring that graphics to life. When you hit something, it hurts. The cars will flip, spin, roll, crumple and crack. It is frighteningly realistic. Fortunately you are fixed up and placed back where you had the crash with no damage at all. If this was real life, you would be sucking your dinners through a straw for months. The ‘Burnout’s’ themselves are great too, the screen blurs and the screen gets a semi-fisheye lens effect, just to speed things up even more. Madness.