Just like its predecessor, Burnout 2 features a boost gauge that can be filled throughout the course of a race. For those who are new to the franchise, the gauge can be filled by what are essentially Crazy Taxi-like maneuvers. Doing things such as driving close to traffic, power sliding and gaining massive air will quickly fill your meter. After the meter fills you will be given a momentary boost that will help put some distance between yourself and the competition. Other than the boost function, the game plays primarily like your typical arcade racer.
Burnout 2 was released nearly half a year ago on the PS2 and it shows in this relatively unchanged port. The polished visuals that made
Burnout such a crowd pleaser two years ago seem to have been relatively unchanged for this sequel. The sheen on the vehicles is just absolutely generic and for that matter, so are the relatively blocky and unrefined models. All of the little minute details that made
Burnout 1 so impressive, such as the working turn signals, still look pretty decent but haven’t really aged too well. The traffic, although generic, looks pretty good as a whole but the actual player vehicles really detract from the overall visual package.
Vehicle deficiencies aside, the game still looks great thanks to the environments. There’s a real sense of scale here, you don’t just drive through the city, you’ll feel dwarfed by buildings and skyscrapers. Other trackside objects such as trees and barricades look pretty good as well, especially in terms of scale and ratio. Never once did I feel like I couldn’t walk step out of the vehicle and believe that I was in a fully realized world. While the general structure of the objects look pretty good some of the textures in the game could use a bit of work, especially the putrid dirt and rather pedestrian wall textures. Thankfully for the majority of the game you’ll be traveling fast enough to the point where you won’t even notice these deficiencies.
Crashes will send fenders, tires and various other pieces of your vehicle flying into the air in an amazing shower of sparks and rubble. To put things into perspective the crashes in
Burnout 1 look tame in comparison to what this bigger and badder entry has to offer. Vehicles will now be flung into the air and tumble end over end until they become unrecognizable scraps of metal. We especially loved how the action keeps moving around you regardless of the crash. This causes even more vehicles to be sucked up in the wake of your chaos, leading to massive pileups in the middle of long and speedy highways. This is the perfect game for people who are looking for a great mesh of high octane racing and pure destruction and mayhem.
The same goes for the audio elements. Most of the audio in the game, with the exception of the decent Dolby Digital effects, are pretty much generic and uneventful. Each of the music tracks in the game are your generic background fodder, essentially what you might expect to hear from a Disney made for TV movie of the week. This is the perfect example for everyone out there who wonders what all the hoopla with licensed soundtracks is about. At least the Xbox version allows the usage of custom soundtracks during the races. Like the GameCube version the sound is still a bit unbalance and distorted, as if it were recorded at a very low quality.
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