Burnout Dominator (PlayStation 2)

The Burnout series has always gone from strength to strength in my opinion. I have always liked the mix of adrenaline fuelled racing and incredibly volatile crashes that made good use of physics and collision systems to provide some good solid gameplay driven carnage.

I thought the pinnacle of the series was Burnout Revenge and it had some nice additions on the Xbox 360. I’m not a fan of any specific console or platform, I’m a gamer. As long as the game’s good then I’m there, I’ve played some crap games in my time as well as some brilliant ones.

Burnout Dominator then, for the PS2 taken from the PSP and billed as the most thrilling Burnout yet. No, no, sorry it’s not. I hate bursting the bubble of the PR side of big companies but this isn’t as good as Revenge and has some tagged on crappy new modes.

It’s got online play for the PS2, great, if Sony’s online service was as good as the others – which it’s not.

Dominator feels lack-lustre in every respect except the graphics. The game has gone back to the original style of Burnout though, where checking any kind of traffic except your opponent’s results in a crash and pile-up, so fans of same-direction checking from Burnout Revenge will probably want to give this one a big miss.

It has new cars, which amount to nothing more than skins on models considering the handling never really matters in a Burnout game. It’s about getting up to speed and blasting through the track, near misses and furious road battles are the watermark of the series and in this case, it’s pretty much par for the course.

There are some nice new things in the game of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. I like how you can chain Burnouts now and get a massive score if you can keep the burn going. I like the fact that it features new tracks with special shortcuts that can be unlocked by slamming your opponent into them.

You’ve got car classes like: Classic, Muscle, Super, Special, Dominator, Exotic and Hot Rod with a bunch of cars in each type, unlocked as you play and earn Dominator points. Each one’s different in look and some are faster than others but the handling never really seems to change overly much, then again this isn’t a Forza or a GT game so that can be slightly overlooked.

Some cars are more suited to drifting than others though, you never really care about it because you’re moving so fast there’s hardly time to drift around the corners before you’re either slammed into a wall or you nip through by the skin of your teeth, watch the paintwork!

There’s Maniac mode which is pretty much a race against the clock to get a high score and drive like a ‘nutter’ to do so. It’s not all that fun to be honest and you’ll soon be wishing you can check same-way traffic.

There’s the World Tour which is pretty much akin to Burnout and Burnout II in design, easy to see what you have to do next and how far you’ve come.