The greatest racer on the Xbox 360?

When it comes to racing, Criterion and EA have taken the crown for providing the fastest and most heart pounding experience with their Burnout franchise. After three successful outings on the current generation consoles, EA released the latest installment in the series, Burnout Revenge last fall, which was hailed with rave reviews. Now months later, EA has ported Burnout Revenge to the Xbox 360 with all of the flash and glitz 360 owners have come to expect from their system. While the game remains a truly impressive racing title, has enough been improved upon and added to justify its Xbox 360 existence? Read on to find out.

Features:

• Enhanced high-def graphics


• 10 new exclusive crash junctions


• 2 new exclusive Live modes


• Enhanced Car Deformation


• Multiplayer up to 6 players


• Xbox Live play for up to 6 players

Gameplay
Being the forth installment in the series, by now most gamers know what Burnout is all about. For those of you who are new to the series, you are in for blazingly fast and adrenaline filled experience. In Burnout Revenge players speed their way through highly trafficked courses in various city and countryside locations, while barely escaping collisions to boost their burnout meter. Though that aspect of Burnout is fun, the real rush lies in the many modes that are all centered around one thing: causing horrific multi-vehicle collisions while driving like a maniac. Burnout Revenge offers players three different modes from the start: single player campaign, multiplayer for up to six players, and Xbox Live play for up to six players. The real stars of the play modes are the single player and the Xbox Live options.

In single player World Tour mode players will enter into a large number of events set across the games many locations. These events include Grand Prix races, Burning Lap, Eliminator, Preview races in which the player previews a new location, and the most popular event types Road Rage, Crash, Crash Breaker, and the new Traffic Attack. The Grand Prix, Burning Lap, Eliminator, and Preview races are focused on the first aspect of the Burnout series: racing at high speeds while avoiding near collisions to fill your boost meter and finish in first. The remaining event types focus on the second aspect of Burnout: mass automotive destruction. While the races are a blast to play on your own or with friends, the most enjoyable moments of gameplay are during the destructive events. Why is it that games that allow players to cause massive destruction are always the most fun? Who knows and really, who cares as long as no one gets hurt and you keep the action on your screen.



As noted above, Traffic Attack is a new addition to the Burnout series, and while it is fun, it gets old fast and doesn’t retain the excitement of the Crash and Road Rage modes. In Traffic Attack, players are given a set amount of time in which they must smash into as much traffic as possible in order destroy the required number of cars to earn a medal. For every few cars you hit you are awarded with more time and while this is nice, it makes this event type too easy which causes you to become board with it. The concept is a sound one, but the implementation needs a bit more refinement. Another new addition to the series which players can use in every race is traffic checking. With traffic checking players can smash through cars of their size or smaller which are traveling in their direction without crashing. This is a welcome addition to the series since in the past you would often fail an event or trigger a crash too soon because you accidentally rear-ended another car. With this new system in place you can slam into another car, send it into other traffic and cause a pile up before you have even reached the point that you want to slam your car into traffic and cause a massive pile up. This way you are able to cause multiple pileups and earn maximum points.

While the only new addition to Burnout Revenge offline over its current generation counterparts was ten new crash junctions, Criterion did manage to offer two new features for Xbox Live players. In addition to offering the same modes found in other versions such as Crash Tour, Crash Battle, Crash, Road Rage, and Race, 360 owners are given the new features Save and Share and Live Revenge. Save and Share allows players to share their greatest crashes from the single player World Tour races with the online Burnout community. How this works is the player will be played a replay video after completing a race. The player will be able to advance through the video to where they would like to record up to 30 seconds of what they feel is an impressive crash. Once the player records their footage and it is saved to their hard drive, they may then upload the footage to Electronic Arts network. Once the footage has been sent to EA players will be able to view these clips from other players and the top 20 most watched clips will be entered into contests. This feature works great and really helps to give the 360 version a greater sense of an online community. Hopefully this feature will be expanded upon in future installments of the franchise or even in other games.