Destructive and action-packed elements in a racing game. Seriously, how cool is that? A must-buy for any racing fan.
When you first start out Burnout 3: Takedown, you will notice there's a Burnout 3 World Tour option in the Main Menu. Here is where you might spend most of your time. There are a total of 173 events to play through in the world tour. The events vary as ether Street Racing, Road Rage, Crash, Eliminator, or a special event where you do exclusive stuff, such as race in formula 1 cars only. All these events are scattered across 3 continents around the world: USA, Europe and Asia. Some events can often be on one course, or more. Events can vary on what tracks you race on, but you will be seeing familiar stuff in your events always. For Example, You might be doing only a small track around a city, but not continue outside of the city since there's a limit. When you are finished with events, you will be awarded with ether a Bronze, Silver or Gold metals. It's always best to get the Gold Metals since you unlock a lot of stuff. The difficulty of getting the Gold Metals varies, but in general, it's not hard to get them. As you beat events, unlockables will come often, such as new events, new cars, new special headlines for certain actions in an event, Postcards also for special actions in an event, and much more. Expect to play through this huge world tour for over 15 hours or more. Other categories, such as Single Events, Multiplayer and Xbox Live, are what else Burnout 3: Takedown offer, which are also worth checking out.
Burnout 3: Takedown makes huge improvements over its previous games in its family. Burnout game focus mostly on arcade style racing where you ether get from one point to another, or racing around a route course for certain laps. In Burnout 3: Takedown, however, things changed a little. This time you can destroy your rivals in any race you participate, which can be done in many cool ways. Like in the previous games, your chosen car has a boost meter which fills up the gauge whenever you do something risky, such as driving on the wrong side of road, passing very closely to random traffic, crash into rivals, and a lot of others. The boost meter increases in size whenever you crash your rival into a wall or something. This is helpful since if gives you a better advantage of winning. Unfortunately, like in real life, you have to be a little cautious on the road. If you happen to crash recklessly, then you will be frozen for a couple seconds, and when you automatically recover, your boost meter decreases a little. Thankfully, if you do crash, there's an extra feature called Aftertouch Mode. In Aftertouch, you can control your vehicle a little for cool actions, such as crashing your rivals if you have the chance. Sometimes, though, the camera will be out of place where you can't see where your rivals are, so it won't always work. This racing formula seems to always be cool and gets you pumped up for action.
Originally introduced in Burnout 2, the Crash Mode is a highly addictive part of the Burnout series and has become a trademark. In each intersection you are assigned, you have to crash your vehicles at an intersection full of cars, buses and trucks. While crashing other vehicles, you will have a meter which detects how many crashes you should have before you can use crashbreaker. If you reached the limit, you can use crashbreaker to make additional destruction to the intersection. After the time is up, the game will add up how much damage you made and how much it would cost to pay for all that (good thing we don't really pay for all this mess, lol). In the Burnout 3 World Tour, there is a certain amount of money you need in order to get the medals I mentioned before. Since there are a total of 100 crash intersections in the game, once they are unlocked, it feels good there's a variety, but some of them feel the same. So it's not really a fantastic thing to have that much. Still, there's doubt of the humor found in the crashes you can cause.
All the other stuff is fun too. Road Rage is a basic survival mode, where you crash other rivals until your car explodes after crashing multiple times. As said before, Multiplayer and Xbox Live modes are worth checking out, as they offer a nice variety of categories of gameplay you and your friends to enjoy. This entire package represented in Burnout 3: Takedown feels complete and to impress anyone who plays it. So no racing fan can deny the fact on how fun the gameplay in Burnout 3: Takedown is.
Graphics:
While not quite the best-looking racing game around, it does offer nice visuals enough to be a good looker. The cars look really nice with the shiny details coated on them. They also respond well to the crash physics done on them during intense conditions. The environments sometimes look great, but also sometimes look a little bit bland. The bland textures are mostly the buildings and some hills, while the good looking textures are the special effects, such as the sunshine and the water. At least there's a variety of graphics represented in here though. One thing worth mentioning is the sense of speed in Burnout 3: Takedown. It definitely feels fast and dangerous when you're cruising down the road at around 200 MPH. Another thing worth mentioning is its solid smooth frame rate. The speed of it varies, but it never seems to slow down much in any game mode, except for a couple intense conditions, such as the multiple crashes in Crash Mode. But aside from a few flaws, Burnout 3: Takedown delivers a solid impressive-looking visual department.
Sound:
The default music is mostly your metal and pop music you would hear from some musical artists today. Most of these songs fit very well in the Burnout action, so it's nice to have some good music support for the races. If Burnout 3's music isn't your thing, then if you play this on the Xbox, you can just use the custom soundtrack support found in the Settings. The sound effects are as great as the music. The sound effects for the cars are very realistic, such as the tires screeching and the wind you hear when passing traffic. The crashes are also pretty loud and violent too. One disappointment in this game is the DJ voice heard in the races. He interrupts often and comes as more of an annoyance then being helpful. Thankfully, there's an option to turn off the DJ voice. The soundwork in Burnout 3: Takedown is very good, overall.
Conclusion:
On the personal side, I'm not a huge fan of racing. Burnout 3: Takedown didn't really change my mind ether. I like how much this game offers and this is often pretty enjoyable, I don't consider this to be an outstanding revolutionary game like most gamers think of it. But even I felt it was worth playing when I tried the game out. Any racing fan would love this game, and should not hesitate to buy it. Burnout 3: Takedown offers so much to keep you hooked on for a very long period of time.
Pros:
-Great, action-packed racing
-Great sense of speed
-Tons of unlockables and events to play in
-Graphics and audio fit well into the Burnout feel.
-Long replay value
Cons:
-Camera in Aftertouch mode can be a pain at times
-DJ voice is pretty annoying (can be turned off though)
-About half-way through the world tour completion, things get a little repetitive