Burnout Crash! (Xbox 360)
The Burnout series of racing games revels in the vehicular destruction that unfolds thanks to high speed collisions, to the point many games include an extra mode where crashing is the entire point. Burnout Crash! is a smaller side game in that series, but it feels like it takes the next logical step for a series so enamored with watching vehicles crash into each other and explode. With no racing mode whatsoever, the entire point of this Xbox 360 game is to cause as much destruction as possible, all of it starting once you ram your vehicle into some unsuspecting driver.
Burnout Crash! assumes an overhead view of the action, almost as if you are a kid about to ram his toy car into others to make one huge mess. During a round of play, you’ll drive your vehicle into a busy intersection, the action kicking off in earnest once you’ve made first contact with another car. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the world of Burnout Crash! is very destructible, the other vehicles not your only target for carnage. To rack up a high score as measured by the total monetary cost of your destruction, you’ll need to not only try to make a dangerous pileup in the middle of the road, but you’ll want to also destroy the nearby buildings too, and thankfully your car isn’t just an idle piece of scrap after the first hit. Your vehicle has a unique function called the Crashbreaker that will allow you to make your car explode so it can be launched elsewhere, the energy for this power refilling faster if you caused a good amount of chaos with your last hit. Aftertouch also allows you to better guide your vehicle as it soars through the air, meaning you can do things like pull off billiards-style shots but with vehicles being launched to cause trouble elsewhere.
Rather than it being mindless mayhem, Burnout Crash!’s Crashbreaker and Aftertouch systems can actually turn things into a rather strategic score-chaser. Vehicles will be blindly driving into the intersection reliably but do begin to try and avoid danger once they spot it, so properly blocking their paths to guarantee hits will certainly rack up the crash count but your score might not climb too high if you’re overly patient. Using the Crashbreaker well can launch you into cars to earn extra money by way of Skillshots like the earlier mentioned billiards-styled ricochets, but it’s also far more likely you can take down high value targets like the buildings if you remain aggressive in your Crashbreaker use. However, if you end up in a bad spot because you chose your timing poorly, vehicles can slip on by and your Crashbreaker meter might take a few seconds to refill, meaning you can’t just blast your way around the screen without a plan. Different intersections will change how you’ll want to navigate your wrecked car around too, some of the larger junctions including things like multiple intersections, roads that are separated by dividing barriers, or even roundabouts that can be blocked a bit by something like a lighthouse in the center.
Depending on the mode, how challenging an intersection can be can change a fair bit. The game’s campaign features eighteen stages that can be played in three modes, although you’ll always need to do Road Trip mode first. Road Trip has the basic rule of trying to make the most expensive and chaotic crashes possible, but if five cars are able to slip by unscathed, the run will come to an immediate end. Blocking an intersection properly while still finding frequent crash opportunities definitely defines this mode, the penalty for letting a vehicle slip by potentially rather strong and it even influences how the level is meant to conclude should you not reach a premature end. A Road Trip round will end in disaster if you manage to survive it, but considering your goals, that’s a good thing. Whether it’s a plane forced to make the road an emergency runway, a tidal wave, or a UFO attack, if you can stick it out to the end, these disasters will come in and sweep up the area for huge payouts, but their strength is determined by how well you did in the stage. Each vehicle that slips by will drain 20% power from the disaster, but there is a way to undo that damage and it plays into one of Burnout Crash!’s most delightful touches.
There are special vehicles that appear on the road in Burnout Crash!, some of them appearing at set points, others a bit randomly, and some in response to special conditions. One such vehicle is an ambulance that will wipe away one missed car from your Road Trip performance score so long as it safely escapes the intersection, the function already interesting but the musical touch what really helps it shine. Burnout Crash! has a lot of fun using licensed music to emphasize certain special moments, so when the ambulance shows up, you’re told instead it’s Dr. Beat hitting the street, the game playing an excerpt from Gloria Estefan’s 1984 pop hit of the same name. If you trigger the Bad Cops event where police try to come bust you and remove your ability to move your car for five seconds, the game goes for the on the nose choice of the Cops theme song Bad Boys. It’s an obvious selection, but it’s also the kind you can usually only make with your group of friends, Burnout Crash! instead willing to shell out the money needed so it can play something like a brief bit of It’s Raining Men when a thunderstorm starts just because it’s the kind of fun silliness that fits a game all about constantly crashing fake cars that don’t even seem to have people inside driving them.
Vehicles like the pizza truck can trigger the kind of random events that can help or hurt you based on how they land, and in Road Trip, some of these are guaranteed to happen once you’ve collided with enough traffic to keep things interesting. This does introduce a bit of luck, but already it’s likely best to wait until you’ve beat the game to go for high scores, the vehicles you gradually unlock that pack more power or responsive Aftertouch all getting an upgrade after the campaign to make them even more capable. The remaining two modes provide some additional longevity too, especially since they play into the game’s Star rating system. Burnout Crash!’s new cars and locations are unlocked by earning stars, each level having a set of five tasks per mode to shoot for in order to earn them. Most of them are to hit a certain score threshold, but these can include optional tasks like destroying specific buildings or parked sports cars, guaranteeing a disaster is full power before it hits, and making effective use of the vehicles with special effects. You don’t need to earn all the stars in one go of a level, but it does raise interesting considerations and most stars at least require some effort to earn, making them satisfying to shoot for and another influence on how you try to approach a level.
The Rush Hour mode is perhaps the purest form of chaos and carnage the game offers, there being no penalties for letting cars slip by as you are simply given 90 seconds to do all the damage you can. Looser and more forgiving, the stars you earn still require a good eye for how to use your Crashbreaker, especially since the round ends by blowing your car up in something a lot less impactful than a disaster wrecking the city. It isn’t too surprising this is the mode chosen for the game’s multiplayer since it’s not so punishing, although it is unfortunately tied to Kinect controls despite the rest of the game working with just a standard controller. Having to move your body around to control a car viewed from overhead and do silly motions to activate Crashbreaker is a novelty at best and a huge letdown if you’re being honest, especially since the multiplayer is alternating play so it doesn’t even have the chaos of creating crashes together. Rush Hour does work well in its standard format though, especially since the final mode available for a level is a lot stricter.
Pile Up mode reduces the number of vehicles that will enter play by a considerable amount and removes elements like events being triggered once you hit a certain amount like how it worked in Road Trip. Pile Up definitely requires the smartest movements and Crashbreaker use since you can’t as easily block the road, and that task was already sometimes complicated by the fact wrecked cars can ignite and explode so the wrecks can disappear from the road. Pile Up will punish you for letting a car escape, but not through failure, instead weakening an Inferno multiplier that boosts your score a considerable amount as long as something is burning. The round even ends with one final push to incinerate as much as you can, a countdown starting if things aren’t alight but you can chain together frequent explosions in a way that again adds an interesting element of planning since you can potentially pinball around various pile ups to ignite them and earn a huge end bonus. Ultimately all the modes are fairly similar but still set apart because of how best you need to play them, different approaches key to actually clearing the cash benchmarks that were wisely set so that you can notice your improvement as they come more easily once you get a feel for how best to blow things to smithereens.
THE VERDICT: This is the part where I should probably say that Burnout Crash! can get repetitive, especially if you don’t set up crashes well and need to go back into a level to try and earn the stars you missed out on. However, while additional unique intersections and a wider range of insane complications would spice things up, it can be captivating beyond just the thrill of seeing wanton destruction because it requires some thought to actually earn those stars. If you get complacent and play mostly as a road obstruction, you won’t make much progress, and using the Crashbreaker effectively adds constant strategic considerations. You can delight in the moments of revelry with over the top disasters and quick pop tunes while still getting the strong satisfaction of knowing high scores and stars come from expert play, keen reactivity, and smart use of everything at hand.
And so, I give Burnout Crash! for Xbox 360…
A GREAT rating. While smashing vehicles into each other isn’t commonly seen as a task requiring tactical consideration, Burnout Crash! presents a style of play that does require clever action if you want to earn stars and rack up high scores but doesn’t abandon the dumb fun you’d think a game about crashing could have. The focus will be on the mayhem most of all, different areas letting you smash apart airports and even boats by knocking busses into them while avoiding the bulldozer that tries to clear the street of the obstructions you set down. There can be quieter moments depending on your approach, but the musical accompaniment to special moments become surges of energy as it underscores a moment of revelry or one where you need to be careful like when Dr. Beat is there to help. Obviously Burnout Crash! would be better if it had packed in more unique content instead of using modes and a star system to breathe extra life into the small selection of intersections on offer, but that’s an easy bit of critique to levy and not really a condemnation of what is on offer either.
Rounds of Burnout Crash! are filled with moments of exciting chain reactions, heartbreaking errors, and fun musical interludes that come with a unique sort of disruption that spices things up so the game never truly settles down fully. It may not play like a usual Burnout title, but playing as a constant source of chaos that also requires a clever guiding hand to actually put on a decent showing means Burnout Crash! can easily pull you back in for more. Your growing understanding of how things interact, the goals sometimes encouraging you to take special risks, and some smart systems that prevent aimless chaos and overly cautious play equally, these are the ideas that make Burnout Crash! the kind of game that can mix its dumb fun with its engrossing gameplay considerations. Playing Ice, Ice Baby during a blizzard may seem like a simplistic choice, but as you slide around shattering frozen vehicles for massive points, it’s easy for even the silliest of touches to feel like the perfect accompaniment to your amusing attempts to try and wrangle this motor vehicle mayhem as best you can.