Review: Burnout Crash!

Posted by Brad T on October 11th, 2011 | 0 Comments | Tags: Burnout Crash

Burnout Crash puts you in control of a single car capable of causing massive pileups and explosions that devastate whatever intersection you happen to be at.  Crash is pure Mayhem, but only if you know what you’re doing.

Whichever vehicle you choose in Burnout Crash has two abilities: the explosive “Crash-Breaker” and mid-air movement called “After-Touch.”  As you progress through levels and gain stars, you unlock new rides each with tweaked stats in both explosion and movement departments.  Do you want to control a car that can zip around in the air bouncing from car to car to trigger bigger pile-ups, or do you want to cause such massive explosions that no car on the road (or building by the road) is safe from you?

Crash has numerous locations to cause destruction.  Each general location has 3 different intersections to visit and destroy.  The general locations all have distinct themes that set them apart from each other, while the levels within have different traffic patterns to disrupt.  These locations include an airport terminal, a college campus, and a Roswell-like area among others.  They also each have their own “Super-Feature” to activate which is usually some hilarious form of destruction to finish off a level.

As you can tell from the screenshots, the game has an overhead perspective.  This works quite well, allowing you to see the majority of the playing field all at once.  The graphics are slightly cartoony, which gives the game a light hearted identity that often comes off hysterical when coupled with the excellent sound design.  Crash employs ridiculous explosions, pin-ball sound effects, and some of the best music samples of all time to forge such a fun identity that I found myself constantly cracking up during gameplay.

There are three different game modes in Burnout Crash.  Road Trip is the normal mode in which you have to stop a set amount of cars without letting 5 cars get past you.  Once you destroy enough cars, bonus features happen.  There are both good and bad types of features you must deal with, from sinkholes that cars fall into to fog that obscures your vision.  Once you complete the level, the Super Feature is triggered, with its strength in proportion to how many cars you let through.  Rush Hour and Pile Up are unlocked once you complete a level’s Road Trip mode.  Rush Hour gives you 90 seconds to destroy as much stuff as possible.  This forgoes much of the strategy of the other two modes, instead dealing with pure chaos.  Pile up gives you 30 cars to stop.  Depending on how many cars you let through calculates an inferno multiplier.  This multiplier maxes out at 5x and is active as long as something stays on fire once traffic stops.  Pile up shows off some crazy high scores, with one of mine being close to 200 million.  Each one of these modes have stars to be unlocked by doing certain tasks.  These tasks range from getting past certain score plateaus, to destroying hidden gold cars or certain landmarks in levels.  With these stars you unlock Ranks, Cars, and eventually, new locations to destroy.

It takes a smart player to get good at road trip.  You have to practice to achieve the necessary balance between clogging up the roads and blowing up objects for points.  With the correct strategy, any level can be bested without letting any cars get through.  At first, the sting of seeing a perfect run go up in flames because 4 cars come in quick succession can be downright enraging.  But as I mentioned at the beginning of this review, you have to know what to do and when to use your crash breaker.  With some practice, that rage goes away, and all that is left is a hilarious time.

Burnout Crash employs the Autolog high score system.  I sat down and used this system to best every one of my fellow editors’ scores.  It is the perfect system for score chasing, and automatically alerts you when someone beats your score.  Decimating my friends’ scores was the most fun part of this game.  Get the Demo, and give this one a shot. 

A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation 3 version of the game.

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