Key Takeaways
- Burnout 3's Takedown gameplay is visceral and thrilling, offering a satisfying mix of speed and destruction in races.
- Crash Mode in Takedown is a standout feature, offering challenges and fun with power-ups and explosive crashes.
- Despite being 20 years old, Burnout 3's visual design and fluid framerate still hold up today, creating a visually stunning experience.
Watch your step, for you’ve just entered the Graveyard. Inside, we’ll be digging up games that have long been without a pulse. You’ll see both good and bad souls unearthed every month as we search through the more… forgotten…parts of history.
As a fan of Burnout from second one after a Blockbuster rental of the original, few companies captured the early 2000s quite like EA's many franchises of extreme sports and adjacent games. Burnout as a franchise doesn't act as a perfect pop-culture time capsule like Need For Speed Underground or SSX to a lesser extent, but still evokes the time period with its soundtracks -- which gained a lot when Criterion brought the series to EA instead of relying on Acclaim for publishing duties. In the past, we have covered the Burnout series in the Graveyard with its last non-open world entry in Dominator and the prior mainline entry in Burnout Revenge.
Takedown has been seen as the best entry in the series, and upon replaying it after playing Revenge for so many years off and on, there are things that Takedown does better than Revenge while Revenge's faster overall pace is something I prefer in moment-to-moment gameplay. Takedown excels compared to not only other Burnout games, but other racers in general with its plethora of areas to race in and overall track selection and race variety.
Rad Racing
Takedowns as a gameplay mechanic are something that has become a far more normal part of racing games and while it's rooted in things like Chase HQ making contact with cars, takedowns took it to the next level by having you take out enemies in a wide variety of ways. Doing so allows you to not only gain momentum when it comes to taking out rivals in nearly every game mode, but also gets the blood pumping as the race goes on. There's a visceral thrill to surviving a back and forth exchange on the track and then sending a rival over the guardrail or into an oncoming vehicle.
Burnout 3 rewards players with special takedown markers for things like sending people into the river or slamming them into a pole in a tunnel. Having targets like that to achieve pre-dated achievements but fits right in line with them keeping you going for just a bit longer. During my most recent play sessions, I had a riot getting all but one signature takedown market checked off for an area and opted to keep going for another hour until I cleared them all. In doing so, the constant drip-feed of unlockable content slowed me to see an ever-present reward for putting in that effort.
Takedown Time
As you make progress through the in-game map full of content, you'll do things like unlock more events to tackle or vehicles and the seemingly never-ending amount of cars that unlock in a lot of cases by reaching certain takedown targets throughout the world. Having the ability to takedown foes in a regular race is fun, but Burnout is at its best for me when I'm in the road rage mode and your goal is to take out a certain amount of cars in that race. There, you want a nice mix of speed and weight because a lighter car is harder to get a takedown with and also more vulnerable to being knocked off the road or slammed into - so going with a balanced build is best in that mode.
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Graveyard: Burnout Dominator
Having that takedown target achieved marker come up is an endorphin rush and one thing that Burnout 3 nails that PGR 2 did as well was allowing you to keep going on an epic run no matter what. With PGR 2, you could set your goal as bronze but still get a silver or gold medal-level finish if that happened to occur. With Burnout 3's road rage mode, you'll always want to get a bronze because this is the easiest overall mode in the game -- but can usually get a silver off of that if you can get a bronze since it's usually a 2-3 takedown difference. Gold is a healthy challenge because with road rage mode, as opposed to regular races, you do have to worry about taking too much damage. If you're taken out too many times or just crash a bunch, then you're out. You can do aftertouch takedowns and those are also a lifeblood of regular races to refill your boost instantly after a crash, but also the Crash mode where your goal is to cause as much monetary damage as possible in a single chain reaction-causing crash.
Crash Mode Chaos
Crash mode has been seen by many as the definitive mode of the series because it's so defining to this series and even had its own download-only Crash Mode spinoff title, but Takedown took the concept that debuted in Burnout 2 and expanded on it with more scenarios. It basically plays out like a mini movie scene as you have a limited selection of vehicles to choose from for it compared to a regular racing event and made you try out different vehicles to what you might normally stick with in those events. Burnout 2's version of the mode was effective in that it got across the idea of doing a lot of damage quickly, but was also pretty lifeless. One big upgrade from 2 to 3 was the ramping up in real-world details and a ton of life being added to the world. Burnout 2's races and crash mode were hurt by being in generic and somewhat bland areas, while every Burnout 3 course and especially the crash events had a theme around them that made them stand out.
For Crash mode, having a target and then coming nowhere near it right away is common because there are so many variables at play. The vehicle limit works in your favor to an extent because it ensures that there's a way to accomplish this task without needing a certain vehicle, but sometimes you get some beast of a vehicle that's harder to control than the regular cars and it throws your timing off a bit. Thankfully, power-ups litter the tracks with things like 2X and 4X multipliers for what you can get alongside bronze, silver and gold dollar winnings to ensure a victory of some sort even if you don't time your crash into other cars quite right. Sometimes, you can get an aftertouch in to grab a power-up and save your bacon and the moment-to-moment excitement of the mode never ends.
Visually, Burnout 3 is 20 years old but doesn't look it thanks to a sharp art design and fluid framerate. While we've seen games like Dangerous Driving by ex-Criterion devs offer a more modern-looking version of Burnout 3's formula, the original game still holds up nicely. Car designs being generic helps with the variety since they're not limited to any licenses and crafted many different vehicles that both resembled real-life vehicles -- which probably helped when it came to re-releasing it on the 360 years later too. The cars have pretty clear text, the environments have a lot of real-world details to them in the signs and it's a gorgeous-looking game even today.
Audio-wise, the star of the show is always the crashes. Visually, those satisfy by having bits and parts of cars flying everywhere, but the crunch of the metal adds so much violence to the races without actually being overtly violent. The smash of the cars into the wall for a takedown is satisfying and the little bell ring that occurred for signature takedowns let you know that you accomplished something cool years before the Xbox 360 achievement ding set off dopamine receptors for everyone on that console too.
Head-On Insanity
Burnout 3 did get a backwards compatible release on the Xbox 360, but with that storefront being closed now, you are limited to the disc version being playable and that works just fine on 360. Sadly, Burnout 3 did not get an Xbox One/Xbox Series digital re-release nor is the disc playable on a modern-day system. It's a real shame because it's likely due to the music licenses and EA did opt to re-release Burnout's fourth mainline entry Revenge on newer devices and if I had to guess, I'd say it was an either/or scenario when it came to licensing and they could get the OST done for Revenge. It's a shame that such a gem is seemingly going to be lost to time to some extent, but luckily 360 can still play it just fine and it isn't just locked to the original Xbox hardware. 20 years later, it's still an incredibly fun game to play and break out for any length of time and hopefully EA gives it a re-release at some point.
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