a wholly passable arcade racer like its progenitor. delivers on "burnout 1 but better" in the most average way it can honestly, just more tracks, cars, and events with some minor aesthetic and gameplay overhauls.

the main issues here are
A: why are these races so long. you get a few in that acceptable 3-4 minute window and then anything on a decently long track starts creeping up to a gruelling 6-8 minutes. that'd be on the longer side for an average simcade, but in this kind of modern arcade racer? really wears you down over those long ass grands prix especially seeing as there aren't that many environments (still a leg up on burnout 3 in track variety though)
B: difficulty. you either pick the new fastest car you just unlocked and breeze past everyone with a consistent 5-15s gap or you pick something suboptimal and have to fight tooth and nail the whole race, which i can only really find fun in games that don't make me do it for 5+ minutes straight. again, this is still a leg up on burnout 3 because at least that difficulty feels earned and not because the leading AI is tied to your car by a length of rope.

the driving really is fun and those crash physics have so, so much more impact than in 3, but it really feels like it's missing some important element that i can't quite place...
i trudged through the first series and called it quits for now, i'll come back to do the custom series one day and i'll probably be able to place what that je ne sais quoi is

Burnout 2

Hello, Nino here. Today, I wanted to give you impressions about Burnout 2: Point of Impact. The reason why I do Burnout 2 and not 1 is, that 2 is fresher in my mind, since I just played it recently. And mechanic wise, the two games are very similar, with 2 being an improved version of 1.

So, let‘s get started then. Burnout 2 is an arcade racer created by Criterion and published by Akklaim in 2002. It got released for the PS2, GameCube and the original XBOX. It features six game modes, with most of them being tied together in the so called Championship mode, which is basically the game‘s campaign. You have Grand Prix, Face Off, Race, Pursuit, Crash, Time Attack and Driving 101, with Grand Prix and Face Off being only playable in the Championship. The others can be freely selectd from the main menu once unlocked, whereby Driving 101 serves as a tutorial mode for new players.

The game itself takes place on a semi interconnected map. The different areas are:
-Pacific Airport, which is self explanatory
-Big Surf Heights, a mix between urban and coastal streets
-Palm Bay, a downtown focussed area
-Interstate 88, the local freeway
-Crystal Summit, the mountains surrounding a dam
-Sunrise Valley Springs, a desert city

Now, semi connected means that some of these tracks flow into each other. For example, the Heartbreak Hills track takes you from Crystal Summit to Interstate 88, while Interchange 88 has a small section in Palm Bay. It‘s not much, but it helps with the immersion that you are in larger area and not simply on some random places around the world.

Now, it‘s a bit hard to say if all these areas are part of a large city or different cities altogether, especially with how close together Palm Bay and Big Surf Hights are. That said, they all have their distinct feeling, with Crystal Summit for example mostly consisting of narrow, turn rich roads, while Palm Bay has large roads with lots of intersections. And the Airport has large one way streets, which either make you flow with the traffic constantly, so that you either have to rely on Near Misses to fill your boost, or you‘re constantly driving into the incoming traffic.

All in all, there are 15 different tracks, both available in a regular and a reverse version. To switch things up, there are a few weather effects. Sometimes you drive at dawn than during the day in the dessert, sometimes there is snow in the mountains and other times you have cloudy weather at the Airport instead of clear skys. It‘s not much, but it helps to break up the monotony.

As for vehicles, Burnout 2 offers a mix of drivable everyday cars, like the Fiat like Compact, the Escalade like SUV or the Mazda like Coupe, and more special ones, like the Cop Car, the Cruella De Vil like Gangster or the Daytona inspired Oval Racer. Overall, there are 14 unqiue cars with 7 of them having a Custom variant.

Gameplaywise, Burnout 2 works on a Risk vs Reward system, with the Boost mechanic being at the center point. Boost is similar to Nitro in other games, though it doesn‘t charge up automatically, but you have to drive risky. That includes driving on the opposide site of the road, driving close to civilians without touching them, jumping or drifting.

And the game incentivizes you to keep bossting with a mix of more subtle and more obvious mechanics. A more subtle, but effective one, is the music. When you drive regularly, the music is rather calm and relaxing and doesn‘t really fit the action on the screen. When you use your boost hower, it charges up and picks up a louder and more exciting pace that suits the high speed races of Burnout. It is effective, but also made me wish that the boost soundtrack was the original OST and that they had picked something else for the high thrill music, because the regular soundtrack sounds pretty lackluster in comparison.

The second way to keep you boosting is, that you lose the charge when you stop using it. In other games, you can use up half of your Nitro and use the other half later on in the race. In Burnout, you keep half of your charge, but you can‘t use it, unless the meter is full again. This is especially noticeable when your meter is nearly empty and then you have to refill it completely.

You see, Boost meters stack and while you are boosting, you already collect power for your second boost. In the best case, you chain them together so that you are constantly driving at high speed. In the worst case, your Boost ends with half or a quarter of your meter already being full again.

And the third way that the game tries to keep you at high speed is the penalty for crashing. If that happens, you lose roughly a qurter of your current meter, so there is no point in safing it for a later time. This leads to a constant balance act between driving at high speed and the control required to avoid traffic. Do I drive on the opposite lane to keep my Boost going? Do I drift around the corner and risk crashing into something? Do I deplete my current Boost meter, even though I quickly approach the traffic at the intersection, and get half of my meter back or do I slow down to avoid the cars, but lose my entire bar? The game is full of these small decisions and it‘s up to you to keep the balance in your favour.

Another nasty thing that Burnout 2 does is tricking you into thinking that it‘s ok to not finish at first place and the tutorial demonstrates this perfectly. To unlock the next lesson, and the game as a whole, it‘s enough to get a Bronze medal in each category. However, if you want to drive the Student Car, which the game gives you for the tutorial, in other modes you have to get a Gold medal in all of them. And that is the case for the whole game. You didn‘t win every single part of a Grand Prix, but still get the most points? Sure, the next Grand Prix is unlocked, but you don‘t get the opportunity to get a new car. And the game only tells you after the fact, so if you don‘t know about this beforehand, you can find yourself repeating a whole set of up to 6 races again. The only exception to this is the final race, because there is no special reward for winning a Gold medal, except of a warm handshake.

Burnout 2 is also deceptively easy. Now granted, this is a matter of individual skill, but personally, I didn‘t struggle much with the Championship mode. A few of the later levels were a bit more tricky, but all in all, I didn‘t have much trouble staying in first place.

The general gist is this. During the campaign, you partake in a set of back to back races called Grand Prix. Those are all of the single race maps of the game combined into different packages. Depending on your position, you collect points. The 1st place gets 3, the 2nd 2, the 3rd 1 and the 4th none. Accumulate the highest number of points and you win the Grand Prix.

To mix things up, there are two other events included in the Championship, Face Off and Pursuit. Face Off is a 1vs1 sprint against special vehicles. Win the race and the car is yours.

Pursuit, as the name implies, is a Cops vs Robbers mode. You are the cop and have to take down escaping racers by ramming their cars. Unlike in other modes, they have a health bar that has to be depleted. Arrest the racers and win their car. In the campaign, those events are set on specific tracks with specific vehicles, but you also unlock a stand alone version of this mode, where you can freely select the vehicles and the tracks you want to drive on.

Overall, the Championship consists of 15 events. Finish them all and you won the game.

Hehehe, ahaHAHAHA! Oh you fool, you really thought so. Oh no. Nonono. You see, Driving 101 wasn‘t the tutorial of the game, that was only there to teach you the basics. The real tutorial was the Championship. And now the game has taken the training wheels off and it‘s time for the true campaign, the Custom Championship.

Like the name implies, the Custom Championship is a harder version of the regular mode, where your unlock and drive the Custom variants of the starter vehicles, one of them being visible on the box art. The cars and drivers are better, the margins for error are smaller and every track is driven in Reverse. It‘s a huge step up compared to the vanilla Championship and some races require you to drive flawlessly if you want to have any hope at being in first place. And you want that, because, as before, the corresponding Pursuit events are locked unless you win a Gold medal in every race, with the last Grand Prix being the only exception.

And the difficulty not only stems from the AI being less prone to crashing, but from them getting a headstart, which can make catching up to them somewhat difficult, especially on the more curvey roads (Yes, I‘m looking at you Heartbreak Hills, you little… ). And while that might be an understandable moves from the devs, giving the technological limitations back then, it also feels very cheap.

And speaking of cheap, Burnout 2 has some other shortcomings. Most aren‘t the fault of the game, but simply stem from the fact that it is 20 years old by now. But some of them can be effect the game in a negative way. For example, the walls and rails of death. We all know them, we all experienced them in one way or an other. That moment, when you grind along a rail you have grinding along dozens of times already and bam, suddenly it makes you crash. This happens here as well and while it is rare and you will learn which places you should avoid and which you can grind along, it‘s still annoying as hell when it happens.

And the other one is the crashing, respectively the damage model. Again, this is more due to the age of the game, but it feels of when you grind against a wall or bump into a car, but don‘t get any damage. I‘m not talking about full on crashes here, but stuff like breaking your windshield or scratching the paintjob, which was implemented in later Burnouts.

And speaking about crashes that system is a bit wonky and unreliable. Take my words with a grain of salt, but from what I gathered, if you drive normally, you only crash if you run head first into an other car. But if you are at an angle, you are mostly safe. However, if you use your boost, all bets are off and you will crash most of the time.

This isn‘t that big of a deal in regular races, because it will most likely help your out more than anything else, but in Crash mode it‘s a huge annoyance, especially in later levels.

To explain, Crash is a secondary mode in Burnout 2 and not connected to the Championships. Like the name implies, you are on a short part of the regular racing tracks and have to crash into the traffic to start a chain reaction and to cause as much havoc as possible. You only get one try though, since you don‘t rtespawn after you crashed your car.

The first levels are pretty straight forward, but later levels require more tactic, like letting some vehicles drive away, so that you can get a bigger bulk further down the street, or crashing into a car in such a way, that it flies into the oncomming traffic. And that is were the aforementioned unreliable behaviour with crashes come into play, because it is pretty annoying when you get the right angle to launche a civilian car, only to grind along it and having to restart the whole thing.

So, coming to an overall conclusion, is Burnout 2 worth playing in 2023? I would say no. As much nostalgia as I had for the game, it feels pretty dated by today‘s standards and the later games have more features, cars and graphical fidelity. I would recommend the game though, if you are looking for a more grounded, street race like experience, since Burnout 2 doesn‘t have all the arcady features, like the Crashbreaker, Pick-Ups, Aftertouch or Traffic Checking, of later games.