June 7th, 2011
By iman927

Genre: Racing
Systems: Playstation 2 and Xbox
Developer: Criterion
Publisher: EA Games
Release Date: September 2011

Burnout 2: Point of Impact happens to be one of my favorite racing games. The pace was fast and the crashes were spectacular. Burnout 3 seems to take this a step further.

The focus this time around will be on takedowns. Basically, you get to use your car as a weapon. Now, there are no rocket launchers or anything. What you do is you try to drive other people into walls and oncoming traffic. You get points and a larger boost meter for running other players into walls and causing them to wreck. Speaking of the boost meter, you no longer have to wait for the meter to be full to unleash the boost. This looks to be very promising with multiplayer.

You get to steer your car during a crash. Instead of losing all control and watching your car skid, you are able to steer the car a bit and try to have your car stay in the middle of a road. This will help you try to create a chain reaction.

The game is online this time around for BOTH PS2 and Xbox (one of if not the first EA online game for Xbox). The online game is looking to be a continuation of the offline game. There are no differences between online and offline, except the racers are humans instead of AI.

The game promises to be larger than the previous game. There are about 65 single player offline races, 75 cars (I am guessing many are to be unlocked), over 25 tracks, plus a new mode called Road Rage. Road Rage looks to be a very fun game both online and off. The point of this mode is to be the last car standing. This can be accomplished one of two ways. First, you can cause the other racers to crash (or hope the other racers crash). Second, you can win the race. When playing offline, you need to get a certain number of takedowns to receive an award. It replaces Pursuit mode from Burnout 2. Road Rage looks to be much more fun than Pursuit mode.

Crash mode is back (rejoice!) and bigger than ever. In a nutshell, you get scored on how big of a car crash you can create. This time, there are over 150 crash junctions. This is sure to make any Burnout fan smile.

The graphics are incredibly amazing on the E3 demo. The game looks smooth and incredibly fast, the fastest I have seen in a game yet. You have a bigger sense of speed than in Need For Speed Underground’s Drag mode. The game is blazing and runs at a solid 60 frames per second.

Look for Burnout 3 to hit the stores this September.