Burnout

burnout is a racing game. it kinda sucks. there is very little else to say about it beyond that and yet here i am about to say many things about it. because this game was saved from the annals of obscure 6th gen mediocrity and miraculously spawned a series of games that are all far superior to it, off the back of one little feature. and because of that it is Historically Significant and thus i felt the need to play it for the first time in the year of our lord 2022.

maybe i'm a bit off the mark calling it a "little feature" because the crashes in this game are basically the only thing that sets it apart from being the most generic racing game of all time, and also there was a pretty decent emphasis put on them. but compared to the later games with their crash modes and far more detailed damage physics, the crashes in this game feel like a paltry little addition to the racing formula. and yet, as tame as they feel now, they were the main selling point back in 2001.

honestly they're kind of a gimmick that breaks the flow of gameplay, further exacerbated by the frequency with which they happen because the crash "detection" is super oversensitive and will often wreck you from a light tap. later burnout games improved this by adding features like aftertouch and crashbreakers, but here they're just kind of annoying as all you can do is watch your crash get replayed from different angles while your opponents fly past after you slightly scraped a car. it all feels very purposeless, something that was bound to age poorly because its only draw was "look how cool the crashes look with our 2001 technology."

aside from the crashes, burnout plays much like an arcade racing game - as in a literal arcade game - translated to consoles. actually my friends were surprised it was not literally an arcade port. you've got a few tracks, a small selection of cars graded by their "difficulty" to drive - just like sf rush! - and there's even a constant countdown timer in races which is extended by checkpoints. tacked onto this is a means of progression in the championship mode, which consists of four 3-race "grand prix" events and 2 "marathon" events. completing each grand prix unlocks a one-on-one "face off" event which earns you an unlockable car.

and that's pretty much it! the game is very barebones in terms of content. you have 5 generic cars unlocked at the start, and there are 4 unlockable cars - two of which are competitive, whereas the other two are large, heavy, impractical vehicles that are basically just for "fun" only they aren't even good for that since they crash almost as easily as any other car. ultimately the unlocking of cars is kind of irrelevant unless you want more variety, since the muscle car is unlocked from the start and it's arguably tied for the best car in the game.

aside from that, there's a fair amount of tracks, but only 5 unique locations. the game pads itself out using variations that are reversed or at a different time of day, although they also have slightly different layouts so they feel reasonably "different" to drive. the designs of the tracks are honestly pretty solid, although brought down by extremely questionable scripted traffic decisions. the traffic patterns in this game are pre-set, meaning that there will always be traffic in the same place on each track depending on what lap you're on. of course criterion apparently thought it would be funny to frequently do things like putting two cars crossing an intersection at the same time or a passing bus blocking it completely, which are nearly impossible to avoid. realizing that the traffic is scripted and that these things were done intentionally as opposed to just being bad luck made them more infuriating.

of course i also have to talk about the "marathon" tracks, which combine all the courses in a given region (3 american tracks, 2 european tracks) to form one massive track. they're a neat idea! i think it's cool to have all these interconnected courses as a sort of endurance race, taking 12 minutes to complete the euro marathon and 18 minutes for the usa marathon. the problem comes when one crash near the end can force you to do those 12-18 minutes all over again, even if you drove completely perfectly the whole way until then. because at that point the marathon races stop being "a neat idea" and instead become a thoroughly miserable experience.

yes it's time to talk about the rubberbanding. it is extremely blatant. later games would at least offer you the illusion of making a gap, since they constantly remind you how many seconds you are ahead (or behind). this game does no such thing. no matter how fast you are, the opponents will be right behind you. if you crash, you WILL get passed unless you're lucky enough that the ai crashes into your wreckage. but maybe even more egregious is that once they get far enough ahead of you, the rubberband snaps. see, the ai is actually kinda neat in that they also make mistakes and crash into traffic which helps equalize the races. the problem is the traffic only spawns around the player, because why waste processing power calculating the paths of cars that the player can't even see? what this means is that once the ai is too far away for traffic to spawn, they can just speed off without worrying about crashing and get farther and farther away with no hope of catching up.

rubberbanding aside, the actual racing mechanics of this game are occasionally fun but mostly pretty mediocre. the driving physics aren't the worst i've played in a racing game, but they tend to be slippery and imprecise, especially when you're trying to drift, and very numb otherwise. there's not really much else to it. you can't take opponents out like you would in burnout 3, but you can perform a pseudo-takedown by shoving them into traffic, which is about as exciting as this game gets aside from when you're boosting. boosting is probably the only thing that sets this game apart aside from the crashes, and naturally became another one of the series' signature mechanics. and here we find another problem with this game.

your boost meter, filled by driving in oncoming, drifting, and near-missing traffic, fills WAY too slow, and is very easily taken away by a single crash. also, you can only start to use boost once the meter is full. so you barely get to use boost - i tended to get boost once per lap if i was lucky, and occasionally i'd go a whole race without getting to use it at all because whenever the boost bar was full or nearly full i'd get screwed by traffic and lose it all. which sucks because it's when this game's driving really gets fun. evidently, the later burnout games realized this, and allowed & encouraged far more frequent usage of boost, resulting in altogether more fun gameplay. good job criterion!

there is another mechanic at play with the boost here, however. if you burn through the whole meter without letting off the boost button, you do a "burnout" which by default restores the boost bar to about half. if you do so and also stay in oncoming traffic the ENTIRE time, it will actually fully restore your boost, meaning you can keep going and chaining burnouts together. which is neat in concept but also goads the player into making dumb decisions while trying to chase that high, since the fact of the matter is there's very few situations in the game where you can actually use a full boost bar nonstop without crashing, and even fewer while staying in oncoming. but even knowing that doesn't stop you from trying because boost = fun = happy and it ends up leading to heartbreak when you crash and now have no boost at all.

from a technical perspective, the game is nothing to write home about. its best aspect is its solid 60 fps framerate, which helps elevate its sense of speed and fluidity, no doubt aiding its novel perception in the eyes of the gaming press circa 2001. this comes in exchange for graphics that are exceedingly average in a post-gran turismo 3 world, alongside a very generic aesthetic style and ui that certainly doesn't shake off the feeling that this is an acclaim-published budget title. to its credit, the environments and different time of day variations look fairly nice.

it's a miracle that boost does feel as fun as it does considering there is almost no visual or audio feedback - you've got the the plainest looking meter youve ever seen, no flames from the exhaust, no burning sound effect or really any change besides more motion blur and the music fading to a thumping heartbeat. the engine sounds are very flat-sounding to the point where i don't remember a single time i even noticed them.

speaking of the music, it doesn't really help fill the void left by the sound design as it's some of the most utterly inoffensive and bland "racing game music" i have heard in a game. it wasn't bad or annoying at any point but it also made basically zero impression. there was also a pretty wack attempt at "dynamic" music mixing. i noticed multiple times when the music went silent for a moment before returning in an attempt to loop. additionally each location has a "normal" and a "dramatic" music track, and it abruptly switches to the latter usually after crashing on the second or third lap. the way it switches is really jarring and pulled me out of it when i was actually kinda vibing to the normal music.

i'm grateful to the original burnout for setting the foundation for the series that would eventually produce imo the greatest racing game ever made. but i'm gonna be 100% real: there is just no reason to play this nowadays. maybe if you just want to experience the tracks... but aside from that there's basically nothing here that isn't massively improved upon by the sequels. not even really a weird quaint early-series charm to it. it's basically a nothing-game. you can complete it in 4 hours and there's very little reason to come back to it afterwards. god bless acclaim for being desperate enough to let this happen and also get a sequel.

Burnout is a tech demo of car accident physics lightly modified into a punishing arcade racing game. Street races through busy highways and city traffic tease the payoff of high risk, high speed weaving, but jagged visual detail and a far too strict collision model lead to continuous race restarts until you really learn a track. The capacity for any incidental contact with traffic to cause an accident is at odds with reckless mindset invited. Each player wreck halts the race to deliver a multi angle instant replay accompanied by an estimate of repair costs, tripling down on the precise moments you question if you're having any fun.