Burnout 3: Takedown  

It must be so difficult being EA, at least this year. Last year's Need For Speed Underground sold in phenomenal numbers, and the sequel's due out before this year's end. What do you do to fill in the gap inbetween, aside from re-releasing the original title at a budget price point? Well, if you're EA, you buy up developers Criterion and release Burnout 3, the latest in a series originally published by the now defunct Acclaim. OK, to be fair, EA had signed up Criterion for Burnout 3 prior to buying them, and that was a purchasing decision that was more clearly aimed at ownership of Criterion's precious Renderware platform than of any one title. Still, it leaves EA in a position where they're likely to collect the larger share of the market for arcade style racers. It also leaves them a significant challenge, as Burnout 3 is an exceptionally good arcade racer, albeit one with a few niggling bugs. As such, Need For Speed Underground 2 is going to need to be one heck of a title to raise interest. Sure, EA probably doesn't care -- they're likely to get your money either way.

Burnout 3's basic premise is summed up very nicely in the game's opening tutorial section -- it's an arcade racer that's all about risk versus reward. All of its races take place on busy sections of roadway -- most of them suburban roadway with quite a lot of traffic on it. Naturally, crashing your vehicle is bad, but as with previous Burnout titles, the closer a line you can shave between crashing into other cars and just zipping past them at the last second, the more speed-enhancing boost you'll get. More boost makes you drive that much faster, and that much more dangerously, and before you know it, you're mentally trying to work out if you can squeeze inbetwen those two oncoming trucks and around another car while travelling in excess of 150kph.

Burnout 3's subtitle is 'Takedown', and it's in the area of aggressively taking on other vehicles -- computer controlled or real world opponents -- that you can earn the most rewards, both in terms of boost within a race, but also in rewards that you'll incrementally earn as you complete races, crashes and other special events across three global areas. Taking down other vehicles is also the fastest way to earn additional boosting capabilities, as you not only fill your boosting meter, but also extend its size for each vehicle you take down. The other main innovation in Burnout 3 is the ability to engage a slow motion "impact time" that gives you subtle (and completely unrealistic, but who gives a damn?) aftertouch control during crashes. This is important, as even as you plough into a power pole, you can spin your car into other racers, earning you big points, and big boost when you do get back on track. It's not a precise science -- you don't have control over the game camera and so have to employ a little guesswork to pick where your opponents are likely to race through -- but it's awfully satisfying when you get it right.

Burnout 3's reward structure is exceptionally well paced, as no matter what you're doing (or, for that matter, how well you're doing) you'll be earning scores that will unlock extra features. Placing first in an event will naturally unlock extra special features, but along the way you'll also be tracked on the amount of insurance damage you do (measured in dollars), the number of enemy vehicles you take down -- both against normal obstacles and via special 'signature' takedowns on specific areas of each track. You'll also earn basic Burnout points for placing well and taking exceptional risks -- extreme powerslides and driving on the wrong (from a US perspective) side of the road, for example. So even if you totally stuff up an event's specific objective by, for example, just battling the car in fifth continually, you're still increasing your totals across each area, unlocking vehicles, events and game types as you go.

Burnout 3 also scores well in terms of available game modes. If you've played any of the previous Burnout titles you'll be aware that they're not just simple arcade racers, as you've also got options to create the largest and most devestating crashes -- and who wouldn't want that -- as well as a plethora of different basic races, from elimination races where the car in last place explodes after every lap until there's only one survivor to time trials to competitive races against a single car, with winner-takes-all stakes.

All is not perfect in Burnout 3's world, however. The final code could probably have used just a little bit of tweaking, at least for the Xbox version we reviewed. There are minor bugs -- the most irritating of which is that while the game supports custom soundtracks, it completely fails to remember that you've elected to use one, so every time you start the game you've got to re-select your custom soundtrack. Then there's the bigger bugs -- we hit more than a few instances where the game froze up completely. That's especially annoying when you've just completed and won a long race sequence and are waiting for the autosave to kick in.

Online matters are, if anything, a tad worse -- at least at the time of writing. Burnout 3 supports Xbox Live, but it's also dependent upon EA's own servers. There's no additional charge for this, and that's for the best, because what we've seen so far can only be described as a complete disaster area. More often than not we found ourselves unable to log into the service -- it would say that Xbox Live was not available, but every other title we had experienced no problems at exactly the same time. Our friends list dropped in and out of availability all the time we were playing, and while the game is meant to track your online stats, we were greeted with far too many instances where it would simply tell us that it had been unable to do so. The online problems are all (hopefully) fixable, because Burnout 3 online is extremely good fun -- it's fast, frantic and the gametypes encourage plenty of teamwork, plenty of adrenaline, and naturally enough, plenty of crunched fenders and vehicles gracefully flipping through the air before ploughing at high speeds into concrete pillars. Ahem. Don't try that in the real world, now, will you young folk? Despite its slight bugginess, Burnout 3 is still an exceptional game -- easily the best arcade racer of recent years, and, as we mentioned at the start of this review, something that EA themselves will have to work extremely hard to outdo when Need For Speed Underground 2 ships later this year.

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