Review: Burnout Dominator (PSP)

Ever since Electronic Arts acquired Criterion, the Burnout games have become increasingly aggressive, showy and brash. But before the next generation instalment continues this trend further, they've gone back a couple of steps and released Burnout Dominator for the lo-fi systems.

It's not completely back to basics, mind you. The World Tour mode forces all sorts of variety upon you in the form of road rage events and maniac challenges in addition to normal races and time trials. As you earn dominator points, you unlock higher classes of vehicles and do the whole thing again. If you only care for one type of race event and want to avoid others, your only option is the Record Breaker mode where you can choose any event on any track with any class of vehicle, but you don't earn points and can't unlock new cars (the differences are largely superficial anyway).

Burnout Dominator has a good risk/reward structure. On the one hand, you don't want to crash; but driving dangerously fills your boost bar, which you can unleash for a burst of speed. It also sees the return of burnout-chaining, where you fill your bar to the top and keep refilling it before it drains away, racking up score multipliers in the process. This fantastic addition makes for some great challenges, such as going for ridiculously high chains and boosting around the whole track without a break (there are trophies awarded for these kinds of things). The sense of speed when you're whizzing around the tracks is incredible, your eyes focusing on the horizon, looking out for any sign of on-coming traffic, and trying your best to near-miss everything so your bar stays filled.

Smash! Your car hits an annoyingly placed low concrete wall or central reservation, sending it spinning in the air, bits of metal contorted and broken off and glass shattered to pieces. Dominator's track designs are not the best, and the added difficulty of seeing distant objects on the lower resolution screen of the PSP compound the issue further. Indistinguishable pixels have the habit of emerging from the gloom as rather solid obstacles, and the way-markers that block off roads are not always sensibly-placed for high-speed racing. Furthermore, few of the corners are satisfying to drift around as they seem tailored for either normal speed or boost speed but not both, and the early cars are reluctant to give away too much of their traction. Once again, the game generously lets you 'scrape the walls' and force your way through. The elegance of, say, Burnout 2, has not found its way back here.

Crashing is not the end of the world, in fact it's quite a lark. You can go into slow-motion and steer your wreck into another car (this is known as an 'aftertouch takedown'). Further, if another car is close but not in line for a collision, you can use whatever remaining boost you have to literally explode, taking them out with you. It's so satisfying when you catch more than one opponent in the explosion. Truly this is a game that doesn't want you to get bored or frustrated whenever you hit a slight snag.

EA's presentation is of the in-your-face variety. Performed a good drift or filled your boost bar? They want you to know about it with massive text covering half the screen and blue flames flaring up off the gauge. Every time a new song from the 'EATrax' list is selected, it's shown in the corner of the screen, obscuring your view of the boost bar. Every new challenge opportunity is presented to you through an unskippable video montage. Minimalist design, this isn't. If you're not getting pumped to the max, extreme-style, maybe the soundtrack will help you find your pulse. Then again, it's a soundtrack that thinks Avril Lavigne and Killswitch Engage go well together, so perhaps not.

Burnout Dominator is a slick and impressive game, running smoothly on the PSP. It lacks the motion blur effects of its console counterparts, but despite that, is a considerable achievement, especially the collisions. This sort of high production value is not uncommon for an EA game, especially one in the hands of Criterion, but the veneer is occasionally rubbed off when something peculiar happens. Gamestyle has seen its car fall through the road into an infinite void and pass through oncoming vehicles as if they weren't there. It's a tunnel-vision kind of game, too; everything is one-way, channeled forwards, designed for the moment. Spin out of control, and you'll notice a translucent wall stopping you from going backwards. Get ahead of a pack of opponent cars in a road rage event, and you'll notice they disappear once they're behind you. Boost ahead in a race event for no matter how long, and you'll miraculously see your opponents bringing up the rear when you slow down again.

Still, if this sort of no-nonsense adrenaline-fueled racing appeals, you won't find much to match it on the PSP. It would have been nice to see it return to the simple traffic-dodging ways of the older games, but there are plenty of pure arcade racers already available for the format to satisfy that hunger. Further, the lack of mini-game crash junctions in this iteration is disappointing but not the end of the world. We should just be pleased we've got burnout-chaining back, which is frankly far more fun than it ought to be.

Rating: 7 / 10

Words by Daniel James