Burnout Dominator (PlayStation 2)

You can race against friends or strangers online and Burnout Dominator supports a few online play modes, again, par for the course if you’ve played Revenge.

The game plays in a fast and frenetic manner but it does get boring fairly quickly, there’s no crash mode and the lack of the quick-replay feature means you lose some of those awesome Burnout moments from the past race.

Visually the game pushes the PSP and the PS2 to a high level. It’s a nice looking game with sharp graphics and some eye-burning explosive crash effects. The Burnout series has always been good at this kind of thing and on the PS2 you’ll appreciate just how far they’ve taken the old engine and tuned it up a bit here and there.

The graphics for the tracks are decent enough, there’s a fair amount of variety this time around and they seem to be better designed than the Burnout Revenge ones. There’s a few bits and places where I spotted a couple of graphical glitches but these are minor and you’re going that fast most of the time you don’t actually have a chance to spot them.

The game’s AI is typical for the series, it doesn’t really push the envelope and it just likes to ram into you. It provides enough of a challenge on the harder races and in some races it’s just plain insanely overpowered, using rubber-banding to make sure it’s always ahead.

The music is a good mix of tracks from some cool bands, there’s no custom-soundtrack of course since this is a PS2 game but the music that EA has licensed can be setup however you want so you can make a playlist of your favourite tunes.

The sound effects are great. I’ve always loved the roar of the engines in the Burnout series and the scraping sound as paint is torn from the side of the car in Revenge, the whump of an explosion and all the tiny little effects people tend to gloss over. These things are just as important in a game as gameplay and graphics as far as I’m concerned.

They did keep the good old Crashbreaker in so you can wreak automotive explosive havoc on your opponents and use the after-touch to get some wicked crash related score combinations. Even with the addition of the almighty Crashbreaker, the game doesn’t do it for me. There’s just too much missing and I’m firmly in the Burnout Revenge style of gameplay camp.

So all in all if you like Burnout and you like the series, just for completeness sake you’re going to get the game regardless of what I say. I don’t hate it and I don’t love it, it’s a so-so title with some additions and some stuff left out. The Multiplayer online and offline might be enough to keep you coming back for more, unlocking cars and new tracks might just keep your attention for a little while longer and there’s racking up Dominator points as well.

For me though I would have preferred Crash Mode and all the slick things I’ve come to expect from a decent Burnout game. Ah well, Burnout 5 is to come!