Almost 20 years ago back in 2004 I bought Burnout 3: Takedown. Not exactly a groundbreaking declaration but you have to understand I'm not really into racing games. Buying this pretty much new at launch on a whim isn't exactly standard behaviour for me. The thing is upon trying it, this game had us utterly hooked. I say us because a friend and I took it in turns playing race by race. Unlocking every car, trying to get higher scores, faster times, every gold medal. We couldn't stop playing it and occasionally we still talk about it in conversation.

That friend moved to the other side of the country over a decade ago sadly. We still game all the time online together as technology has moved on. At least twice a year though I go and stay with him for a couple of weeks to drink, shop and play games together in person. Reliving our late teens and early 20's. I just spent the last week with him and whilst walking in town, what do we see? Burnout 3: Takedown. Needless to say we bought it, went back to his to play it in his newly organised retro game room. (So jealous, especially of the large framed Streets of Rage 2 poster). We then proceeded to be taken back in time to where it was the two of us eating snacks playing games together.

I saw a comic strip recently how playing games now doesn't give the same sort of excitement as when you are a kid. This just simply isn't the case because reliving Burnout 3 from my is still an absolute blast. The game has aged remarkably well. It's fast, blisteringly so. The frame rate is smooth as scenery whips by with every near miss of traffic as you nitrous boost into a corner a thrill. It plays extremely well, each car's arcade handling is smooth and the engine sound effects as you barrel towards oncoming traffic just brings everything together. The thing that always impressed us though were the crash effects of bonnets crumpling, wheels flying off as the carnage ensues from ramming someone into a bridge pillar. The crash physics are so good they created a whole mode for it setting you up to pile into traffic and cause as much damage as possible. Nothing more satisfying than jack knifing an arctic into a tuc tuc then exploding your wrecked car into a camper van in the other lane.

There are other race types too such as elimination where you have to stay ahead of your opponents as last place is removed each lap. The AI can be super aggressive here forcing you to wipe them out to stay ahead. Burning lap which is basically a speed trial. Some need perfect nitrous boosting the entire course to get gold on. Rampage which is about taking out as many opponents as you can in a set time limit, or before your battered car gives up the ghost. There is a huge amount of content here, this is back before unfinished games were released and patched or before half the cars were locked behind a microtransaction store.

If I had to knock anything about it, it's that while I love the garage band type music that blasts whilst racing, the "crash FM" commentator does get a little annoying butting in with nonsense while your racing. However it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things as the rest is so very good. My friend's wife who came in, saw us playing and laughing as the front end of our car got put into the back end from a head on collision simply said, "boy game" and walked out.

But it's a fun broom, broom boy game.

+ Holds up amazingly well technically and in how it plays.
+ Great variety of modes.
+ Crashing is often brutal and hilarious.

- Commentator can get irritating.

When I saw this game brought up in "best racing games of all time" or hell even "best games of all time" lists, I thought it was exaggerated hyperbole. I thought that this game was likely a good racing game that people overhyped due to the fact that racing games aren't necessarily a genre that people really immerse themselves in. But now that I've played it, I can wholeheartedly say that no, it is not a bit, this shit owns.

So unlike Burnout 2, where your car was fueled by adrenaline, in this game your car is fueled by the blood of your rivals. Sure, you could (and still should!) get boost by driving dangerously, but the real way to earn speed is by ramming your enemies into anything that could turn them from functional race car to smoldering scrap heap. For every takedown, not only does it reward you with a full bar of boost meter, but each takedown multiplies your maximum amount of boost. Slamming into an opponent, watching them smash into a trillion pieces, then zooming away from the crime scene at a billion miles per hour with the boost that it earned just fills me with the most shit-eating-grin ass energy. Even if you are on the receiving end of a takedown, you can still control your midair wrecked car to try and take people out with you, and doing so respawns you with all the benefits of a regular takedown. Everything is engineered to turn races into hyperaggressive deathmatches between a few insane racers in a city trying as hard as they possibly can to kill each other. Absolute banger, a must-play whether you like racing games or not.

Oh, and the soundtrack is entirely made up of the highest-tier 2000s pop punk/alt rock complete with doofy radio station with the most goobery-ass host covering everything that goes on in the game. BASED.

The chokehold this would have had me in if I had a PS2 as a kid.

It's rare to see a game so dead-set adamant on what it is right from the first "Press Start," but Burnout 3 dares not mince a single word: "You're not gonna get by just driving good. You HAVE to be aggressive or you WILL lose."

And I wholly appreciate how hard it goes in enforcing that rule. Your rivals will ALWAYS be on your tail, arguably in a rubber band-ish fashion, but your top speed alone is never going to grant you levity. You need to boost, be constantly boosting, and boost at the right time to slip through at critical split-second situations. You don't get that boost for free, either. Granting boost upon successful risky maneuvers is an absolute genius pull. You HAVE to stay in the oncoming lane. You HAVE to battle, trade paint with, nudge into oncoming traffic, and wall slam your rivals. You gotta drift between civilian cars with just inches of space. Doing everything you can to be drip fed that juuuust enough amount of boost to be able to take the win with. Burnout 3 creates such a moment-to-moment gameplay consistency with such unprecedented frequency it practically struggles to be even remotely boring or tiring to play, and its swelling mass of content ensures you won't be running out of things to do for a long, long time. It strikes an incredibly delicate balance of pure, obscene fun, so delicate that the slightest flaw or nitpick would threaten an immeasurable blow to its enjoyment. Unfortunately I have more than a few nitpicks, and they all seem to play off each other in such a way that it’s hard for me to find a starting point.

The first thing that struck my mind during my playthrough was the game’s visibility being notably low all due to the camera’s ridiculously low placement. Your car is not only practically centered, but the amount of real estate it takes up on-screen is nothing but a detriment to your visibility. It is genuinely hard to see upcoming turns, road islands, dividers, rails, rivals; practically everything oncoming, and that goes double when going uphill. Even after hours of playing and familiarizing myself to a self-satisfactory degree I still end up hitting something that I absolutely did not see, resulting in a crash that felt unfair. Another detracting factor in this game’s readability is its lack of any sort of map UI or camera controls. In addition to not being able to adjust the camera to any comfortable degree, there is no form of display where you can read the road map. No minimap on-screen and not even a map display on pause, just a rough overview of the road lines on the select screen. This makes not only reading the oncoming roads but the spatial awareness of your rivals at any given time much more unreadable and hard to follow, and the occasional “YOU ARE X SECONDS AHEAD/BEHIND” marquee doesn’t help.

I wholly understand the appeal of this franchise despite this being the only title I’ve played. It’s adamantly emphasized on vehicular combat and its impressive destruction physics, and they are indeed impressive. When the spectacle wears off is at the realization that they’re unskippable and sometimes overly long, usually not cutting off until the destroyed car stops moving, which could be at any time. The g-force of going 220 MPH to 0 at an instant feels as real to you as the driver in some cases. Pair this with the low visibility and the muting of the in-game music during crashes and it truly feels as though you are ripped from the game entirely, as technically impressive and sometimes absurdly humorous these trademark crashes are, they are nonetheless jarring and whiplash inducing at the worst times, and at their absolute worst during the Road Rage events. Every crash shortens my patience, and every single time I’ve turned the game off was during a crash I no longer had the patience to sit through.

My slightest nitpick overlays the entire web of issues I have; man, do I hate face button acceleration. I have weak, brittle baby gamer hands; I can’t hold Cross or A for any amount of time before my whole hand begins to cramp. Why are there no rebindable controls? Why should I have to rebind them to the triggers in PCSX2 and make a more awkward game experience for myself?

The strangest issue I have with Burnout 3 is that all my problems with it seem to be personal nitpicks. I’ve never seen anyone, anywhere, at any point in time, similarly bemoan these issues. People blast through it like they’ve lived on these roads with real-life familiarity. Everyone loves the car crashes and wacky physics and have no problem with their obtrusiveness. They can play this shit for hours without discomfort, and I can see why. Burnout 3 is an absolute blast and I ultimately love playing it, but with gameplay so touchy and moment-to-moment, I find that any personal nitpick in its range can be catastrophic and detrimental. Fortunately, as elaborate and specific my issues with it are, Burnout 3 is such a strong title on its own wheels that I can’t find anyone, including myself, taking it to be an actual car wreck of a game. This shit still rocks.

to me, video games are technology at the service of entertainment. this game excels at that. criterion and ea at the height of their powers drop this absolute bombshell, their very own commercial engine - renderware (persona 4, gta3), displaying beautiful landscapes, cars that deform in real time at perfect 60 fps even on ps2, only to reassert their dominance the following year with 'black'
gameplay is incredibly tight, every race is just so fun it leaves you wanting more, cars physics are on point for the kind of game it is and the speeding sensations, along with the sound design keeps you on the edge of your seat all the time. It's a very addictive video game and feels like a straight evolution of the racing arcade genre into a format made for home consoles, with its own hooks to keep you from boredom
the soundtrack is a very divisive part but personally i've grown to like it, perhaps because it's rather difficult to ignore. I always turn off the annoying DJ however
as for the car selection I love how it's divided in classes where the models are different (unlike revenge, for example), and i like how they're directly referential of their real life counterparts (say, indy racing, f1 or gt1 models). there are subtle but noticeable differences between each model within the same category
the only real downside i can think of the game is there not being enough tracks, there are just 3 regions that are pretty much 3 large tracks that are cut down into smaller circuits. I feel it's not enough and after playing it for so long i just wish there was more to it. read somewhere the game was developed and released in just under a year, so guess that's a consequence of it
as a footnote, the crash mode is decently fun and i like how its kept separate from the racing modes and neither bars you from each others progression (actually my first time i only played crash mode), and some of the takedown trophies required for 100% are an absolute pain in the ass i dont want go through ever do again
so yeah there isnt much i cant say that hasn't been said yet, i really love this game and think it's an absolute masterpiece, easily one of the best racing games ever made if not one of the best games in general, i hope the people who worked on it are proud of their work, it's just that good

The prior seconds pass with the enormity of centuries. Scattershot shrapnel peppers the asphalt, signaling the arrival of two street demons, both careening through air in a ludicrous display of car-nal car-nage. Like detached limbs, their wheels flail freely, in defiance of death itself, rolling to an uneventful stop against the guardrail. Launched beyond the rail’s comforting bounds, misfortuned motorists find their engines extinguished, their windshields splintered and scattered haphazardly. For what it’s worth, it's a spectacle with little to show for it; the same crumpled wreckages find themselves sprinting down the stretch once again, leaving little but metal and skid marks. Coming to my senses, parallel with the rail, I’m lightheaded and weak.

My ribs are a fine powder, my liver a congealed mass, my brain pulsing red-light, green-light pain and shock overdoses… but my machine roars to life. A gentle nudge of the accelerator eases her back on the straight-ahead, but an injection of noxious nitrous oxide pumps searing adrenaline through her veins – With a banshee’s scream, she climbs to 100, 120, 150, 200 miles per hour. The prying eyes piercing into the roll cage soon burn into spectral light, their lesser vehicles little more than dust against my almighty steed. Lost in the cacophony of merciless thieves, I give chase to secure what’s rightfully mine – The dizzying height, the brightest shine, the golden flow of first place. But my rivals, backstabbers and bastards all, seem poised to pilfer perfection from me once again.

It’s a trio ahead – The former deceased pair, and an impervious highway star leading the pack. In an endless stretch, it’d be a massacre, but with less than two miles left, the nerves start wearing me down. First is the rookie mistakes – a drift too harsh here, a grind against the median there, hell, even a full-scale collision to spice things up, but all too soon I’m peering down invisible crosshairs at the weakest link. Everything happens fast as I shotgun a final blast of nitro into a purring motor, my chariot a battering ram; the lesser of the twins crumples underfoot, ripped in two as hopeless fourth bashes into the corpse. The wiser twin falls just as simply; grinding against my steel chassis, they neglected to peek the eighteen-wheeler hurtling headlong. I can barely make out a resentful curse from the driver’s seat as the million-dollar machine is mulched.

And then, it was you, me, and the finish line. And brother, I wish our tale ended oh so simply, but either through fate or karma, neither of us were to receive fated first that day. It was as it always goes, in the United States, across Europe, to the far off shores of Asia – Even at our best, neither of us expected a humble family of four to be our downfall. You crashed into the van, as expected, but as if touched by a vengeful spirited, your shell bashed into me, and I into the monorail over yonder. Seeing this moment of weakness, hopeless fourth charges, pointless fifth overtakes, and… impossible sixth takes home the gold – My gold.

Still, I can’t help but laugh. Over a hundred gold metals, and I’m still caught off-guard, still left to ponder what-ifs and what-abouts. Pulling a swift 180, I curve my car along the backroad, glancing at the glistening lights in the rearview. With a smile, I hit boost once again… Launching myself directly into the busy highway, where a city bus embraces me at 90 miles per hour.

I wake, still slumped along the guardrail. The dual gods of speed soar overhead, colliding with the gathering crowd. With a flick, I boost back into the race. For one last time, let’s go for gold.

A quintessential PS2 arcade racer. The gameplay is still great, and the soundtrack is pop-punk bliss. The rest of the game has not aged as well.

The UI is among the most generic of its era and navigating it is a chore with events unlocking in an unpredictable order. There seem to be quite a few tracks but not much variety among them. The a.i. rubber banding is noticeable and can be a nuisance.

This was still fun to revisit, but it was too repetitive for me to want to play through the whole single player mode.