Game: Burnout Crash

Platform: XBLA, PSN

Publisher: EA

Developer: Criterion Games

ESRB: E

Genre: Upsized Mobile Car Combat Game

Players: 1-2

What's Hot: Great use of Salt n’ Pepa’s “Push It”; very polished; oddly addictive in spots

What's Not: Boring, one-note/one button gameplay; lots of watching instead of doing; strange lack of player agency/control; challenging only due to huge amount of luck involved; unfortunate use of the Burnout brand

by: Michael Barnes

In a year bountiful with great downloadables that have more than proven their mettle against retail titles, Burnout: Crash stands out as one of the more outstanding failures. It is a game that feels as if it were designed as a one-touch mobile game with accelerometer controls in mind, yet here am I on my couch pressing one button to make my car blow up to cause damage and rack up points, and occasionally tilting a stick (or gesticulating via Kinect in an available mode) to apply aftertouch to the exploding vehicle, trying to get in position to blow up again. Again and again. And then there are periods of complete inactivity, waiting helplessly for a meter to build up so I can…blow up again. The idea is that you drive into an intersection and smash into things, and then use this blowing up business to wreak havoc on both property and vehicles, destructively flailing around the map until either time runs out or a number of cars escape.

Burnout: Crash is a top-down, 2D extrapolation of the popular Crash mode from the much, much better Burnout titles that developer Criterion is quite rightly renowned for developing. As a minor, minigame-class distraction, driving into an intersection at high speed to cause a massive pileup can be fun, particularly when it’s a thrilling, fast-paced and visceral experience that lasts a few minutes, tops, like it was in Burnout: Revenge. As a main course offering featuring three slightly different modes, it feels paltry and desperately short on content, despite offering 18 different intersections with six different themes to smash up with three events at each.

There are also a number of unlockable vehicles that either blow up better or provide a little more mobility. Factor in secret scoring opportunities, star-awarding level goals, Autolog-powered leaderboards and other incentives to keep playing and it seems like there’s a good value proposition for $10, but there simply isn’t much interesting to do in the game at a conceptual level. Unless blowing up stuff really cranks your gears.

The main problem is that the gameplay is poorly conceived from the ground up, at least for a console or PC title. It’s rather startling how little control you have over the game or the car, even after upgrading to the ones that have better aftertouch ratings. Each intersection begins with a brief period where you’re actually driving a tiny car before crashing into traffic, but from impact onward there’s no way to move other than this silly one-button blowing up business. It’s much closer in spirit to something like Fruit Ninja than a proper Burnout game, which makes the use of the brand feel suspiciously exploitative.

It can also be a very frustrating game since so much of it is spent watching the meter that lets you explode fill up while cars appear on the other side of the small maps, winding through the intersection and escaping. It almost feels like there’s a luck element involved, but unlike a pinball game (which the developers claim is an inspiration) there’s often not an opportunity for player skill to mitigate it. For example, one of the bonuses that come up is an ambulance that wanders into the intersection. If it makes it through without crashing (or you crashing it), one of your X’s indicating escaped cars is removed. However, the ambulance has a mind of its own as well as the other cars so there is often no option other than to let fate decide.

As much as I dislike the game, I admit there were a couple of moments when I felt a slight pang of addiction; part of it is due to the Autolog scoring, and part of is due to the numerous accomplishments that goad you into doing better next time. Despite the poor design and torturously boring gameplay, it’s an attractively bright, colorful game with a lighthearted style and Criterion’s signature polish makes it look and feel much better than it actually is. I was surprised to hear licensed music in it, including quite possibly the best (if only) use of Salt n’ Pepa’s “Push It” I’ve ever heard in a video game.

When it comes down to it, this is a game that would not only have an audience on a tablet device or smartphone, but it’s also one where the kind of design it represents would be much more appropriate to the format. For a dollar and within the context of an on-the-go strictly casual game, its single-mindedness and dopey gameplay wouldn’t be so egregious and in fact could be selling points. But if I’ve got a controller in my hand and I want to play a Burnout game, there isn’t anything in this game that resembles that great arcade racing franchise. Give this throwaway a miss and pick up a five dollar copy of 2006’s Burnout: Revenge instead.

Michael Barnes is a regular contributor to GameShark , as a reviewer and with a weekly boardgame column, Cracked LCD , and is one of the co-founders of FortressAT.com and No High Scores.

Questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you .