There has been no bigger arcade racing series over the past through years than Burnout. Ever since the game arrived on the PS2 and Xbox by Acclaim, people have loved the series. When Acclaim went belly up, EA picked it up and made the series better than ever. While gamers everywhere await the next sequel in the Burnout series, they’ve given the fans something to enjoy with a new game for the PSP and PS2. Called Burnout Dominator, the gameplay harkens back to the old original game but with improved visuals.
As with the earlier games, you’ll spend most of your time in the game’s career mode called “World Tour.” In this mode you’ll battle in various challenges and events and earn dominator points which then unlock additional challenges and cars. This gameplay hasn’t really changes from the previous versions of the game. What has changed somewhat is the actual gameplay – for example there is no traffic checking mode in the game, so you’ll have to relearn the rules for Dominator.
As fans of the game already know, when you drive the wrong way or create near-miss accidents, your boost meter fills up. Once that meter fills up you use it to go faster than normal…if you hold the boost button down the whole time and don’t release it you’ll ‘burnout’ which increases your meter…then you can chain burnouts to earn more points.
There are a few new modes, like “maniac” and a “burnout challenge”. In maniac mode the goal is to build up your maniac score by, you guessed it – driving like a maniac. Burnout challenge requires you to keep chaining your burnouts for maximum points. While they are fun the new modes really don’t make you come back for more – they just seem like variations on the already tried and true modes rather than anything new.
In addition to the career mode, there’s also a ‘record breaker’ mode. This mode is more of a pick up and play mode where you choose the event (race, timeattack, road rage, etc) , the track and whether or not the track is reversed. In this mode you are trying to get a score that’s decent enough to upload to the leaderboards. This mode is great when you really don’t want to get too involved in the World Tour but need a gaming fix.
One of the other new features of this game is the “signature shortcut”. There are hidden shortcuts on each track to help you win the game, but the only way you can unlock these shortcuts is by doing a ‘signature shortcut takedown’ on one of your opponents. Once it’s unlocked, you can always access it even without doing a takedown so it is well worth your time to do so, especially in the burning lap (fastest time) mode.
The graphics of the game are very impressive for a handheld and might even be pretty good on a console – everything looks great if you stop long enough to appreciate it. However, when you’re traveling so fast, it can be difficult to appreciate the graphics. The textures of the cars and the roads all look great, but you do not see the same amount of detailed damage as you do in the console. You’ll see broken glass and doors flying off which does give you an indication as to how bad your car is beat up.
