Burnout CRASH! Review
Burnout CRASH! Review
By Jose Bear
-
The End of the Beginning or just the Beginning of the End?
There are some people that would argue that the questions in the title are one and the same but I disagree. I see them as two separate statements that we’d need a little more information to answer. So that’s what I’m going to try to do and we’ll see what happens.
Right, let’s get started.
I would hope that everyone reading this would be aware of the Burnout series and the Crash mode within it but for those that aren’t here’s a quick catch-up. Burnout is a series of driving games developed by Criterion Games with as much a focus on destruction as on crossing the line in first. Within this series there has been a (much loved) mode called Crash. The idea behind Crash is to score as much as possible by causing as much destruction as possible within the time limit.
Sounds simple enough right? WRONG!
Crash was always the ‘puzzle’ mode of whichever Burnout game it was in. It was as infuriating as it was satisfying and I’ve yet to meet a single person who refutes that statement.
Now that you’re all caught up I’ll give you one guess as to the premise behind Criterion Games downloadable installment to the series; Burnout CRASH!
Did you get it right? Excellent, that’ll save me some time.
To round up the rest – There are eighteen intersections (maps), three challenges (game modes) per intersection and five stars per challenge (awarded for fulfilling certain criteria). That’s 270 stars to collect in total and if you’re anything like us you’re going to want all of them.
That sounds simple enough right? WRONG!
Right from the off I became frustrated with CRASH! EA games in the last few months seem to have found a way to have an initial loading time that senses the very moment you believe the game to have crashed before suddenly springing to life, it gets me every time. This is soon enough long forgotten as the colours, art style and, most importantly in this instance, music start to come to life and you realise that the excessive load time at the start was to ensure that everything within the game loads almost instantly.
By this point we’ve had some pretty low times and some pretty high times and generally speaking the good is outweighing the bad.
Now, let’s actually play the game!
Wait, hold on, first we need to decide if we’re playing with a controller or using Kinect. Well we like to think we cover all aspects of a game here at Genuine Gamers so we’ll do both. Start with Kinect and then, once we’ve exhausted the ways to describe how the Kinect controls work (all of which end in ‘like a twat’ by the way, i.e. Jumping around, like a twat or hopping from side to side, like a twat, you get the idea), we’ll move onto using a standard controller.
Honestly though, the game works very well using Kinect. Its only downside is that moment when you catch a glimpse of the sweating oaf that could probably do with losing a bit of weight, and, oh dear God, do you really think another beer is going to help you? Do you?? REALLY??? You know the guy I’m talking about right? What’s he called? Oh yeah, my reflection, that’s right.
Anyway…
With controller now firmly in hand we’re back in our comfort zone (the sofa) and this is where the game gets good, really good.
As I said earlier, each intersection has three modes to challenge yourself on. These modes are Road Trip, Rush Hour and Pile Up.
Road Trip will see you playing through a level until one of two things happen; either five cars escape, at which point you’ve failed, or your trigger the Super Feature, at which point you’ve won.
Rush Hour is just a ‘balls out’ carnage mode. You have 90 seconds to get the biggest score you can any way you can using a healthy stream of traffic.
Pile Up is similar to Rush Hour only with a limited amount of traffic. Personally I felt that this mode was the truest to the CRASH! modes of previous installments as the limited traffic makes it a case of trial and error and essentially trying to solve the hidden puzzle within.
As you progress through the intersections and challenges you will slowly start to unlock a variety of vehicles that will vary in Power (the strength of the explosion) and Aftertouch (how well the cars movements can be controlled by the player after each explosion). This is good for people that want to experiment but we did find after a while that the “middle of the road” cars were all that was really needed to get a passing mark and move on. I’ll explain this want to move on a little later.
So what are the problems? CRASH! looks great, has a great soundtrack, is brilliantly fun to play, hugely addictive and frustrating satisfying (or should that be satisfyingly frustrating). This should be a winner, no doubt about it, but there is something holding it back.
AUTOLOG!
Hopefully all of you have now had some sort of exposure to Autolog or at least know of its existence and function. If you have you’ll probably be swearing at your screen how and calling me all kinds of things but please hear me out.
Yes, Autolog is a great addition to games, I’ve been in love with it ever since I wrote my Hot Pursuit review. Yes, it drives us to retry events and get bigger and better scores so that we can move up the rankings of our friends and have them questioning how on earth we did it. And yes, I want to see it in more games, but here’s my question:
What happens if you don’t have any friends or if the ones you do have don’t like Burnout?
I know that Autolog will look at the friends of my friends but this doesn’t help me if I don’t have any friends to begin with or, in my case, any room to add any of the suggestions. Am I supposed to remove one of the people I’ve formed a friendship with over the past six years and replace them with someone that I may never speak with just so I can see how I’m doing with my scores?
Where are the online leaderboards? (I never thought I’d say that)
Leaderboards aren’t really my thing which is why Autolog is perfect for me in the general scheme of things but with CRASH! I can honestly say I missed them. I wanted to know how my scores were stacking up compared to the world, especially when a score target seemed impossible to get, I wanted to know how many people in the world had figured out the secret, maybe even watch a replay of how they scored so highly.
To say that I had no friends playing CRASH! would be a lie. I had a few that were early adopters and in the beginning it was great. Challenges were being sent back and forth, events were being replayed, scores were being beaten and beaten again but then people started to move on, only coming back for a few goes here and there. This was where the bad times started.
For the sake of this review (and my own personal enjoyment of the game) I persevered, completing challenge after challenge, collecting star after star and then, finally, it happened. I was alone. Suddenly, with this new found sense of loneliness, my enjoyment began to waver. The game was still great but there was nothing driving me to put my all in. My need to get all five stars on an event fell by the wayside and became a need to do the minimum required to open the next intersection. At the time I hadn’t put the pieces together and thought maybe I was just going through a period of melancholy due to Burnout overdose.
Then something happened to make it click.
I was on the third and final event of the penultimate intersection, end in sight, when I got stuck. I kid you not; I had exploded my way through thirty separate attempts to beat the required score to move on, $50,000,000, a figure that should never take thirty attempts to reach. I was losing the will to continue and could take no solace from an empty Autolog leaderboard and then, on attempt thirty one I managed a score of $235,100,500, the highest score I have managed in any mode, on any intersection.
I was over the moon! Briefly.
Then the realisation hit me that nobody would ever know (well, some of my friends might make it there one day) and, more to the point, was this even a good score? For all I know this could be the lowest score ever scored by a human being in this event. For all I know a bumble bee, that’s right, a fucking bumble bee, could have activated Kinect somewhere in the world and tripled my score just by bumbling around, LIKE A TWAT!!
Final Thoughts:
So that brings us full circle back to my original question; Is this the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?
Personally I would hope that it is just the end of the beginning for Autolog and that we’ll continue to see it grow to incorporate more than just the people on your friends list. I’d like the challenge recommendations to include challenges from people that are slightly better on the global scale and fell that this would really take it to the next level.
Only time will tell I guess.
Also,
I hate that bumble bee.
Overall:
8/10
—
Developer: Criterion Games
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Players: 1-14 (offline only)
Release: 21th September, 2011
Initial Price: 800 Microsoft points
Recent Comments