I'm basically cool with the Burnout games so I'm not going to rag on them too much. Granted I've only played 3, Revenge and Legends (on the PSP ("Perssspee")) and neither of the first two which were apparently actually about racing WITHOUT psychotically ramming other racers off the road. Looking back EA probably had some uncharacteristic balls to make the decision to turn Burnout into that sort of game, and based on the three entries I've played and stuff I've heard about the ones I haven't I'm just going to conclude that Burnout 3 is the best in the series.
Not that Burnout Revenge isn't still pretty good! It's got most of the things that made Burnout 3 pretty darn fun and adds a bunch of extra stuff as well, granted most of the extra stuff just makes it muddier (if there's a thesaurus near you, be sure to add "dumber" to the words listed under "muddier". Incidentally, if you feel the need to have a thesaurus near you at all times, perhaps you should consider reading more regularly). Probably the new addition that stands out the most is "traffic checking", and jerks are probably scoffing at me bringing that up before the "Revenge" mechanic that's mentioned in the title, and to those jerks I say that's just a gimmick and doesn't matter and you have a stupid haircut. Anyway, "traffic checking" means you can just wail into the back of non-oncoming traffic now, and in Burnout fashion doing so will earn you boost and points and feelings of "heck yea", especially when you score a trick shot by pounding a Ford Fiesta into a school bus full of children or something.
This one subtle change probably sounds pretty cool on paper, but actually it kind of takes a lot of things out of the Burnout formula that changes it for the worst. First off, the roads are less dangerous now...that sucks. Second of all, why can your car slam a truck into the sun Team Rocket style when you hit it from behind at no risk, but hitting oncoming traffic wipes you out instantly? Also, why does getting slightly nudged into the same traffic also force you to crash when the game demonstrates I can plough through non-racer vehicles like they're your mum? There's also this weird little scratch at my psychology, where the game now awards you with boost for BOTH driving on the wrong side of the road AND ploughing through traffic on the right side of the road (if you've still got that thesaurus handy, this is "right" as in "correct" and not "opposite of left". But due to this game being set in America it's actually both anyway so I don't know why I brought it up, just pretend these brackets aren't here). You know awarding me for "driving dangerously" has more appeal when it's actually kind of possible to drive "safely" in the first place.
And FINE I'll mention the Revenge thing briefly. I could see the appeal in a multiplayer setting I guess; wanting the game to keep track of which of your douchebag friends is slamming you into street signs the most and awarding you for getting them back within the context of the game rather than flushing their head down the toilet. It's kind of dumb in the single player mode though, especially as when a race ends the game reveals the extraordinary personalities you were competing against this entire time go by the title of "DRIVER1", "DRIVER2", "DRIVER3", "DRIVER4" and "DRIVER5". There's only so mad I can get at a faceless PS2 era modelled car, at least let me name all of the drivers myself like in MOTHER 3, or come up with your own Wacky Racer style personalities so I can at least imagine some guy shaking his fist at me in his mangled wreckage.
Enough of that, let's not pretend this is actually some kind of game review and talk about the actual worst thing of Burnout Revenge, and that's the soundtrack.
NO. DO NOT COMMENT AT ME THAT THE SOUNDTRACK IS AWESOME AND I'M JUST A JERK.
Even if it was good music, I can't imagine anything lazier than licensing a bunch of wabbily mid-2000s pop-rock gosh darn GARBAGE for the soundtrack of a racing game. Especially a racing game that has a focus on ridiculous speed and doing that effect where the audio gets drowned out anyway. Burnout 3's soundtrack wasn't good either but I could tolerate it, I mean I'd rather get woken up by two falcons pulling me out of bed by the ears than set anything on that soundtrack as my morning alarm song, but it didn't offend me to hear it during the background of a high speed racing game I guess.
It's not that big of a deal really I suppose, but it's a shame that a genuinely great little series has chose to date itself so horribly with this decision. You could have come up with some original music to give your game it's own little personality, but instead I'm forced to either play the game with no music (which also kind of sucks) or endure your custom soundtrack that you have thoroughly stapled into the game forever. There's two points to writing this piece, 1) that (entirely) licensed soundtracks are super lame and really lazy, Burnout Revenge is just the worst example to me because they filled it completely with the sort of music I despise personally and 2) that EA can't quite release anything without ruining it at least slightly.
So there you go; Burnout's great, Burnout Revenge is pretty good, EA sucks goomba balls. The end.
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