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Burnout 3 : Takedown
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Burnout 3 : Takedown |
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EA – “We’ll own everything” is likely to be their next motto. Monopolising the market, EA have got some very well known titles under their belt. Already ‘owning’ the sports market with their franchises of NFL and FIFA, After buying out Criterion, EA have now got their mitts onto the third title of the Burnout series, in Burnout 3: Takedown.
Although heavily criticised for monopolising the market, EA have surpassed themselves in Burnout 3: Takedown. Takedown is taking your opponents down, whether it’s accidental (which is highly unlikely) or being a fierce driver and forcing them into barriers or oncoming traffic. It has to be said, that these drivers are aggressive and will battle for first place. But what to you get for taking out your opponents? Well, you get boost. Boost to fly past all the other cars, although skill is required as you are going to be travelling over 180+mph.
The game is set across three regions; Europe, US and the Far East. In each region there’s events to complete, Crash, Race, Road Rage and Time Attack, all of which have medals at the end of each of them; Gold been the highest achievable and Bronze been the lowest achievable, bar the failure. Each of the modes are simple to complete, especially Crash in which you just have to cause as much damage as possible; from flying off a ramp and landing on traffic, to simply crashing into a tanker and causing an explosion; oh, and then there is the ‘Crashbreaker’ that allows you to cause even more chaos after a certain amount of vehicles have been hit by other vehicles. When say, 10 cars have hit other vehicles, you can simply tap the ‘B’ button and your car will shoot up into the air, this is where you can direct it to either other vehicles; i.e. a missed tanker, or a missed ‘item’ such as a 4x multiplier.
Racing is sure fun, and the graphics and sound are simply, stunning. The environments are beautiful, even if they’re just buildings at the side of each track, and cars on the road. When racing at immense speeds, you don’t really want to see the scenery. The vehicles are not licensed, but you can tell that they replicate actual vehicles. The vehicles range from simple on the road cars (Honda Civic look-alikes) to a fire engine to a F1 car, a nice selection of vehicles are on offer.
EA have excelled themselves in the single player, but unfortunately, the online play becomes somewhat laggy and broke, sometimes. When it’s working, it works beautifully, no lag, no friends exiting the game due to the server crashing and so forth. But when it goes bad, the EA Servers mess up, bad. Friends can’t get into your room, your EA Friendslist doesn’t work plus many more problems.
On the whole, Burnout 3: Takedown is an excellent achievement bar the online servers. If EA had just let Microsoft run the servers, we wouldn’t be here downgrading the game. But overall, Burnout 3 has the fun and speed of an arcade racer. It really was arcade-racer of the year for 2004.
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