Naturally, in a mode with continues and placement requirements, the course designs are incredibly important, and Burnout does have some good courses… but a few flaws as well. The game alleviates some of the difficulty in doing so by giving the player three credits per Championship run, these credits allowing a player to retry a race if they didn’t place properly. Early championships allow the player to place in third or second and keep going, but the last few require top placement every race. The main mode of play in Burnout is the Championship mode, where multiple courses are raced back to back, the player needing to place somewhere in the top to continue. If you crash though, you’ll lose a chunk of accumulated energy for the bar, which is one reason it can be difficult to build it up. Some courses do try to feed Boost to you by having long stretches where you must race into oncoming traffic, giving that course a bit of a unique feel as you can use Boost much more frequently. When you do have it though, you can attempt to be even more reckless, using up the whole meter to get an immediate refill so long as you stay boosting until its drained, rewarding you for taking the risk of going incredibly fast on such dangerous roads. Things like barely missing another vehicle, driving into oncoming traffic, or drifting into turns all fill up the meter, but the meter usually fills so slowly that you won’t have to worry about impacting races heavily, the player not really needing it to stay competitive if their driving skill is good enough. The Boost is the game’s mild comeback mechanic, the player able to give themselves a surge of speed if they have the bar filled up, but filling it up requires driving dangerously. In a game so enamored with car crashes, it’s no surprise that they want you to play recklessly, and that’s where Burnout’s Boost mechanic comes into play. The good news is that the car still controls well even at that harder levels, and it is certainly recommended you work your way up to it to stay competitive, but the lower difficulty rides can ease you into the game mechanics on the easier starting courses. An Easy car has excellent control but is slow to compensate, while a Hard car is much faster but comes with decreased control. Rather that identifying the game’s selection of vehicles by their stats, the game refers to them with difficulty terminology. Difficulty in Burnout is actually handled in a rather interesting way, as it’s tied more to your cars than any game setting. Having to constantly weave through traffic makes the moment to moment driving of Burnout challenging and involved, and there are still the typical racing challenges like tight turns and track barriers to avoid. Racing in general is already a high speed affair that values balancing your movement with your speed, but having the roads filled with cars to avoid makes things even more intense. While being too sloppy will make a comeback unlikely, it’s nice that you can recover from multiple crashes so long as your general driving ability is strong. A crash won’t doom you either, as even against the game’s AI, the other racers will be getting in their own crashes, ones you can even force them into with some aggressive driving. Instead, a bit after the impact, your car will be set back to normal and you can continue the race. Burnout is well aware you will be crashing many times, so wrecking your car isn’t a disqualification from the race. However, the player can try to cause as much insurance damage as possible for their own personal enjoyment, a price of the crash flashing on the screen and players being potentially added to a “Worst Driver” leaderboard if they cause a lot of damage… something they can do even if they get first place in the race. If you do ram into one of them though, the game’s camera will take over for a moment, replaying the impact a few times from different angles to real nail in the damage, and while this is a nifty feature the first few times you see it, it does lose its appeal once it becomes oversaturated. Burnout’s tracks are all set on roads where regular civilians are still driving about in their vehicles, meaning they’re constant hazards that must be avoided. A race in Burnout is still about trying to get to the head of the pack before it’s over, but getting there isn’t just all about speed. Instead, it takes the typical car racing game formula and implements some ideas that are more conducive to the spectacle of car accidents. However, Burnout is not a game about crashing on purpose. The developers of Burnout decided to embrace this in their game’s design, touting its crashes as the main attraction. People just love a good car crash, especially when it’s in a fictional setting where there is no associated human tragedy.
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