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Burnout 2: Point of Impact Review - Xbox

The memories! This game brought back good old memories of gaming back when I was in my early teens. You know the fun gaming in the late 80's/early 90's that didn't require you to be a genius to play? This game is a pure arcade racer but with all the thrills of the old school games we all remember.

Burnout II is a game that was meant to be fast paced but exciting at the same time, this is the goal the developers wanted to meet and I believe they've met it.

Game Play

Can we say real life road rage on steroids...well if I had to come up with a title of this review that would be the one I would pick. This driving game is pure arcade, fast pace driving and close call crashes is what this game is all about. The game's new Crash Mode the goal is to drive into a "crash junction" and create the most havoc and do the most damage possible with your car. There are 30 of these "junctions" where you are given a scenario, and a dollar amount for the damage you must cause to proceed through to the next junction. The idea is simple and crazy, drive into a junction at high speed and slam your car into traffic to cause havoc and carnage. You hit a passenger vehicle, a truck destroys the passenger vehicle, the truck is hit by a school bus – and you can see the chain of events unfolding. Dollars are awarded through the damage you cause to the first vehicle you hit, and you are also awarded dollars for the damage that all the vehicles involved in the accident sustain. There are three levels you can obtain, Gold, Silver and Bronze. You can certainly see that although Crash Mode is shallow in gameplay, you can spend a lot of time pre planning accidents which is a hell of a lot of fun, and goes some way to add replayability.

The crux of the Championship Mode is not crashing unlike the past Burnout, you can crash and score points in the Crash Mode. The closer you get to denting a vehicle's panel without actually crashing is the goal in this mode. Instead the faster you drive, through oncoming traffic avoiding crashes and catching big air you get your turbo meter increases, once it's peaked you hit your turbo button and you'll see how fast this game really is - it's extremely fast and furious. What is kick ass about the turbo is that once you press the turbo button and you start to speed off at extreme speed, the music gets louder as well as you narrowly miss vehicles, accidents and slide through intersections and corners automatically giving you a greater sense of speed, nice touch!

One thing I felt that they shouldn't make you do is have to take a small set of driving tests before you ... (continued next page)