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 Pro Logic II 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. To make matters worse the sounds seem to have been recorded at a pretty low quality. There was plenty of distortion in my speakers and for some strange reason, the values kept peaking on my mixer. I booted up the PS2 version for means of comparison and learned that these problems only occurred on the GC version of the game.
In addition to the lackadaisical sound effects there are a few other problems with the game. The lack of a rear-view mirror makes blocking opponents a chore; to the point where you’ll probably neglect that aspect of racing entirely. Instead of being able to keep your eyes on the road while spying your opponents you’ll instead have to push the Z button to look behind you, taking your vantage point off of the road ahead. Of course in most instances you’ll look forward just quickly enough to notice a sharp upcoming turn or a big rig that just happened to wander into your path when you weren’t paying attention.
There also seems to be a small problem with the collision detection of the game. It’s obvious that the accidents are triggered when contact is made between your vehicle and an object but it’s no so obvious exactly how much force is required to set them off. Sometimes I’ll hit the side of a bus while going over 100mph and I’ll just graze off of it and go on my merry way, sometimes I’ll hit that same bus going 30mph and I’ll set off a spectacular crash. It seems like if you hit the brakes at the right moment you can avoid triggering a crash and save yourself from losing some precious seconds. It’s a strange problem that existed in the first
Burnout as well.
If you’re looking for a game where you spend more time putting the pedal to the metal instead of trying to hit the apex of a turn, then you’ll definitely want to check out
Burnout 2. This game is for guys who love to push their beasts to the max, men who love to forget about the brake from now and then and rely on the walls to keep them on the track. When it comes to racing games on the GameCube there simply is no better choice than Acclaim’s
Burnout 2.
B
When it comes to racing games on the GameCube, this is as good as it gets. Great action, breakneck speeds and frantic all-thrills racing equates to one arcade racer that you simply must own.
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