Burnout Dominator

8.5
Great

Gameplay	9.0	"Best graphics, most speed, and most fun on a PS2."
Graphics	9.0
Sound	9.0
Value	8.0

By Sam Leitch

The Burnout games - especially Burnout 3 - grabbed the arcade racing genre by the horns and showed us just how tame franchises like Need For Speed or San Francisco Rush really are. The first time you saw any of the games being played, you just knew they had ‘badass’ written all over them.

Unfortunately, since 3, we just seem to be getting stop-gaps. Revenge felt like the third game all over again, but with a few new features and game modes. The biggest difference with Revenge was that you didn’t have to avoid all the traffic. Many fans thought this watered down the frantic Burnout experience. Dominator does away with the traffic checking, as well as having a few more questionable omissions.

Crash mode and any type of network/online modes are completely missing. In previous games, Crash mode was a fun distraction and always a crowd pleaser. You could choose from a variety of intersections and take turns with your mates at causing the most damage. While it was never the deepest mode, it was always fantastically fun, and passing around the controller with a group of mates couldn’t be beat. Also, you can only play Dominator multiplayer in split screen games, and because of the speed and road traffic each player will really wish they had their own screen.

If you have played a Burnout game before, you will have a good idea of what to expect. Dominator, though, seems more focused on the racing than the recent games, however, with the boost bar playing a more important role. Driving on the wrong side of the road, drifting, and near misses, as always, fill your boost bar. Unless you fill it up all the way, though, you can’t keep topping up your boost bar while boosting. However, upon filling the bar, the flames turn blue and if you hold down the turbo without lifting off, using the whole bar, you will earn a ‘burnout’. Burnouts refill your boost bar back up to the maximum. To really master the game, you will have to string these Burnouts back to back. The trickiest bit, however, is that you have to take risks while doing this to keep your boost bar active.

You soon get addicted to seeing just how long you can keep your burnout combo going before inevitably crashing and burning. The only downer with this boost bar is that when you break the chain and start from scratch, it can take a little while to top it up again, whereas in Burnout 3, I never took my finger off the boost - ever!

Playing through the single player mode presents you with the normal races, hot laps and takedown modes (take out your opposition as many times as you can). Dominator also gives you some extra challenges such as seeing how much of a lap you can drift and getting a set amount of Burnouts.

Like any other Burnout game, Dominator is simply a blast to play. The sense of speed is second to none and the action truly is fast and furious, with cars and car parts flying in all directions. Burnout is still the most intense racer on the block. Fans of the series will lap it up as filler until the next game, but for people that have never played the game before, because of the missing modes, it’s hard to recommend this over Revenge, and even harder to rank it above Burnout 3. If I had never played either of these two games before, I would simply be raving about Dominator: it is a fantastic game but it also fails to advance the series in any way. Bring on Burnout 5!

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