Burnout 3: Takedown [Xbox]

The official name of the game may be Burnout 3: Takedown, but Electronic Arts and developer Criterion might as well just come out and call it Burnout: Beavis and Butt-Head -- never before in a racing game have we spent so much time chuckling "huh-huh-huh" and cackling "yeah, fire!" while mindlessly vandalizing everything on the road. Takedown offers blistering speed, the most spectacular car crashes on any console, and an entirely new style of gameplay.

In this newest Burnout incarnation, it's not enough to simply have some close calls with other cars. Takedown both encourages and requires blatant vehicular violence -- players are rewarded for generic and "signature" takedowns of opponents, intended or accidental. Inflicting such takedowns replenishes and increases the storage capacity of the critical nitrous-style "boost." Sometimes it's the only way to claw your way to the lead position in a race... and other times, you'll simply use it to make your vehicle more of a ballistic warhead.

The main single-player game, World Tour, takes place at various fictional (and constantly opening) tracks and intersections in three main theaters around the globe -- the U.S.A., Europe, and the Far East. "Theaters" might sound like too militaristic a word to use... but only if you haven't played the game yet.

The courses are based on regional "tones" rather than specific cities, and are painstakingly designed and dotted with strategically placed barriers, lane-splitters, ramps, pillars, and other objects into which opposing cars can be slammed, scraped off, or not-so-gently nudged at high speeds (your AI foes are well aware of them too, so watch out). After a fatal crash has occurred, the victim's car is put right back into the race, so multiple attacks on the same car are possible, as are revenge takedowns.

The crashes here are, in a word, spectacular. Cars come apart in jaw-dropping sprays of sparks and metal, glinting storms of shattered glass fill the air, and newly-disembodied bumpers and wheels bounce to the furthest corners of the environments. When a car is "killed," time slows down for just a moment and the camera focuses on the deposed racer (as he flips into the air, blows apart, or tumbles into the nearest ravine) for a slow-mo sayonara.

Of course, you can be just as easily dispatched, and that's where the brilliant, twisted notion of "aftertouch" comes in. Basically, it allows players to exercise limited control over the car after the fatal crash has occurred. As the junked car tumbles through the air, shedding metal, glass, and smoke, players are given the opportunity to guide the car-corpse like a clumsy missile.

Which brings us to the obscenely entertaining crash mode. Crash Mode offers 100+ pre-arranged situations -- groups of vehicles sitting at intersections in clusters, carefully placed ramps and boost pickups, and a trickle of ambient moving traffic -- and then challenges the player to take a car right into the middle of it all, at top speed, doling out as much pointless property damage as possible.

What results is a glorious tragicomedy of physics and debris, as the player's car plows into the elaborate setup -- trashing vehicles, snagging multiplier/money pick-ups, and sending trucks, trailers, trams, and other traffic careening and spinning to possibly impact even more targets. Cars burn, the occasional volatile payload goes off, and with the right aim and "aftertouch," you can create a street-spanning roadblock to net even more kills. It's like we said: Huh-huh-huh. Fire!

A final running total keeps track of how much damage you've done in terms of dollars, which can be used to access newer and ever more crash-worthy vehicles, like SUVs, city busses, fire trucks, Formula cars, prototypes, and many more. The crash mode also makes for a surprisingly entertaining "party game" activity, with players alternating to see just how much of a property damage bill they can rack up.

Does this game have any bad points? Sure, a few: One, you're limited to only two control viewpoints -- first-person and a follow-cam view. The other, which is also fairly nit-picky, is the inexplicably uneven soundtrack. Watching the opening movie put amazing crashes to an easy going number like Lazy Generation is a real head-scratcher. Oh well, at least one of the available tracks is I Wanna Be Sedated by the Ramones.

Offline multiplayer consists of road rage, time attack, normal race and crash modes; up to six players can compete online for race and road rage, eight for crash mode (albeit without the aftertouch option found in the offline version).

There's just no two-way streets about it; Burnout 3: Takedown is an eye-opening, awe-inspiring psychotic arcade racer with addictive, high-energy and often hysterical gameplay. EA and Criterion really hit it out of the parking lot with this one... and into the crowded street, off a few passing cars and burning hulks, into a debris-strewn tunnel, then over a cliff.