Burnout Dominator

Published on: 13th May, 2009

Burnout Dominator  | read this item

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This is a weird Burnout. It’s like Burnout: Year Zero, or Burnout Returns, a kind of re-imagining of the series that ignores the more recent developments. Lots of the innovations introduced in 2005’s Burnout: Revenge have been dumped, modes have been dropped, and features last seen in Burnout 2 have been brought back in as replacements. So what we were expecting to be a half-assed rehash of recycled tracks is, in fact, a right awesome Burnout game – and the perfect end to the game’s career on PS2.

The first big reintroduction is the Burnout Chain. This was everyone’s favorite thing about Burnout 2, and has you powering up your boost gauge, setting it off, then driving like a Hollywood celebrity on a cocktail of prescription medication and alcohol into oncoming traffic to try and fill up the gauge again before it runs out. Manage that and you have a Burnout x1. Do it again for a x2. Keep doing it for one of the coolest features in driving games, and one that lifts Burnout above all of its competitors. You have to wonder why this feature hasn’t been in Burnout for the last few years.

Another retro tweak sees the traffic get a little more dangerous again. When reviewing 2005’s Burnout: Revenge we moaned endlessly about how being suddenly allowed to hit the “same way” traffic made the game too easy, especially in its amazingly dull Traffic Attack races. You could, if you wanted, stay in the correct lane and not really bother about steering, racking up way too much boost by jamming traffic up as you flew along. Well that’s been dumped – hopefully never to return.

In Dominator, you crash if you shove the rear of a car going the same way as you, which reintroduces a bit more skill to the Burnout formula. Now you have to occasionally worry about steering. Of course, you still crash and disintegrate horribly if you hit something coming the other way should you veer over the white line in the middle of the road, so you still get to see plenty of those awesome slow-motion crash shots.
Two new unlocking systems also make you pay a bit more attention to what’s happening. Instead of mindlessly plugging through, unlocking cars at random, each race now gives you a target to achieve. So if you want to unlock a new car, you have to perform a Takedown on it during a race to add it to your garage. Also, Signature Takedowns want you to smash enemy cars into certain lumps of scenery, breaking open new shortcuts. The changes, like the same-way car crashing, makes you pay a bit more attention to what’s happening out there on the road. Great tweaks.

There are a few new challenges to keep you interested as well. The biggest is the Maniac Mode, where you’re ranked according to how crazily you drive. The game ranks you on how long you’ve driven in the wrong lane, your Takedowns, the length of your drifts and so on. You have Near Miss challenges where points are scored by scraping the wing mirrors off cars as you pass them, specific Drift Challenges for holding down X and Square and pulling off those huge slides for points, plus you still race against Rivals in some events, giving you smarter cars to smash out of the way.

All of which contribute to the World Tour ranking and event unlocking system, which is about the same as ever. Winning races gets you points, meeting special criteria gets you bonus points, and your running total eventually unlocks a new race series when it passes through certain score barriers.
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