  'Whoops, pardon me sir!' |
Who ever said simplicity has to be a bad thing?
Welcome to Burnout Revenge. In this racing game, you don’t take your car onto closed race tracks. You take your missile-on-four-wheels (that’s in essence what they are) onto public roads and try to be as aggressive, reckless and violent as you possibly can.
The crazier and faster you drive, the more you’re rewarded.
There are a number of modes in Revenge and even though they’re repeated again and again throught the single player campaign, it rarely gets tiresome. There’s Road Rage, where your sole mission is to take out as many rival cars as you can. There’s Traffic Attack, where you have to continuously smash into traffic to keep your time running and earn more money. And of course there’s the Crashbreaker mode, where you literally launch yourself into oncoming traffic and try to cause as much havoc, mayhem and explosions as you possibly can.
And that’s Burnout Revenge in a nutshell. As you finish each event, you earn a certain amount of stars and after reaching a set number of stars, you level up. There are 10 levels in all and the difficulty does get ramped up a fair amount. It’s never too difficult to pass a level, but if you want to earn the highest rankings, you’ll likely be doing certain races over and over again until you get it just right.
One of the reasons the Burnout series is so popular is because of not only the simplicity of the game itself, but because of the simple controls. You can finish most races using four buttons – the R-trigger for the gas, the L-trigger to brake (use that sparingly), the A-button to boost and the B-button to slow down time and to activate your crashbreaker, meaning your mangled vehicle can now become a bomb that explodes, devastating everything in the vicinity.
It seems the developers were really pushing the online play for the 360 version of Burnout Revenge. It’s fun destroying computer-controlled cars but it’s even more satisfying when you know there’s a real person controlling that fast-food truck beside you. On Xbox Live, you can submit clips if you think a certain explosion is more violent than the hundreds of others you’ll encounter and you can easily view clips from other people.
There’s really not much more to Burnout Revenge and that’s fine by us. It’s the perfect game to throw on when you don’t want to put up with the precision handling in Forza Motorsport or Project Gotham Racing. It looks great and it sounds awesome.
In Burnout, just sit back and let the gas pedal do all the talking.
