Burnout Revenge

Burnout Revenge is a racing game that takes the concept of arcade racing just about as far as it can be taken. While sim racers like Forza 2 and Gran Turismo dedicate themselves to simulating racing, Burnout simply aims to offer speed thrills. Driving the wrong way at 200 miles per hour really gets your heart pumping.

Burnout has a sense of speed few other games can offer. The game has alot of highperformance vehicles, though none of them are licenced. Revenge's focus isn't necessarily on pure racing though, half of the game is purely about satisfying crashes. Still, the races are the best part about Burnout, so if you don't want stuff like crash mode, where you simply attempt to cause as much damage as possible, you might be better off getting Burnout 3: Takedown. I haven't played that one, Burnout Revenge being my first game in the series, but I've been told that game focuses on racing way more. 

The game does have a pretty extensive singleplayer, with ten levels that each have over 10 events. These events range from racing (with or without a crashbreaker, which allows you to blow up your car after a crash to take other dudes with you) to the previously-mentioned crash mode, which has you trying to hit the right cars on an intersection to start a huge traffic pile-up, culminating in you blowing up your car for maximum damage! It's pretty cool at the start, but personally, I found that the appeal of this mode wore off rather quickly. I simply played them once to get 4 or 5 stars, then moved on to other events quickly.

Events come in a couple more flavors, like road rage, which requires you to take down marked cars with a time limit. Every three takedowns extend your time limit. The singeplayer racing is also fun, although a little more

agression from the AI would've been nice. They got me sometimes, but that would be simply because I'd touched them and then driven into a wall accidentally, which counted as a takedown. This would mark them as revenge rivals with a red arrow over their roof untill I settled the rivalry by taking them down in turn. 

You can also recieve medals for every event in the singleplayer, and getting gold on all events seems like an almost impossible task. 

Multiplayer really is awesome though, especially since the game keeps a memory of all the rivals you have, so if you meet a rival two months after they took you down, they'll still be marked as priorities. The multiplayer is pretty lagfree for me, which is a good thing because lag at these break-neck speeds would likely cause many a crash on accident. The online community is pretty small nowadays though, only ranked matches still get games.

Overall, Burnout Revenge definitely is a good game. Not an instant classic, but there definitely is are some crazy moments and fun to be had here.