Burnout suffers from "first game syndrome". It's easy to overlook for those who wish to go through the highlights of the Burnout, and by extension, arcade racer peak. On the other hand, it's a bland slog that shows points of promise for the more historically inclined. A glorified tech demo, that it's been often described as, is just about sufficient to determine whether you wanna experience these frustrating beginnings.

The RenderWare engine, in it's sixth-gen infancy, still looks quite nice. The cars sheen, and the detailed and tight race corridors are all quite nice to look at... but the game suffers from some emptiness. Perhaps it's the boring music, or the maladjusted audio mixing, but it's hollow, and it makes the racing a bit boring at times.

The rubberband AI here is the worst, it discourages driving like you'd expect from a Burnout game. If you crash often but stay fast, you'll never be able to get to first place. The game contradicts itself by rewarding following racing lines and staying on the right side of the road (or cheesing your way to the end of the opposite end). There may be times where it all clicks together, and you find yourself chaining up Burnouts, but it's too rare to really get you to seek out this title. The hit detection is dumb. A slight nudge and you're done. The lack of damage you can take is such a major oversite. The racing itself, for whatever is worth, is okay at best.

Once you clear all the GPs, you can unlock some additional cars in "Face-Off" but I found myself too bored with the title by then to really go through the tracks again with my new fangled hardware.

Burnout, at this point, is better served as a historical capsule to be observed and maybe lightly played. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone saying the OG was better than the numerous sequels.

This game is such a mess. The fact you could crash everywhere is funny and bad at the same time. I don´t know what to say... Im shocked but how many times bus ruined my race and i had to restart the whole thing. 12 minutes I love it damn. The cars are kinda different and Sedan must be one of the worst cars I ever driven it´s slow, slippery and it turns like butter IT´S LITERALLY WHAT MY WORST ENEMY SHOULD DRIVE. the last race is way too long this isnt burnout at all this is more like need for speed in a different manner. IDK? Oh and i forgot to about how AI is unpredictable in a bad manner like either you are bonked or either they bonk themselves.

Final Score 40/100 - D Tier Game. I do not recommend.

I love that the focus of Burnout 1 is actually skilled driving - racing on "real" roads where traffic is a major threat (i.e no traffic checking as in some later games).

The main downside was that the arcade style time-limit absolutely ruined multiplayer. If a friend wasn't good at the game, they'd get locked out after failing to reach a checkpoint in time and you'd have to quit the entire race and start again to let them play more. This sort of mechanic is designed to bait more quarters out of players' pockets, not to create a fun experience for a player.

If the reasoning behind the cinematic of crashing was to showcase new technology and add a unique level of tension, then why is it so frustrating when it happens? Like when the game works its fun. Deftly dodging cars while playing as risky as possible to build boost is such a strong design choice for an arcade racer its no surprise how good this series became. Still each bump in the road kills the energy and excitement, it does not make the game more dynamic. It instead creates a frequent obnoxious fail state that honestly deincentives the good work the core danger/boost design loop is putting in. All the tension and excitement drops immediately and all that youre left with is the sting of starting from scratch.

[a shaky foundation.]

burnout is a racing game. it kinda sucks. there is very little else to say about it beyond that and yet here i am about to say many things about it. because this game was saved from the annals of obscure 6th gen mediocrity and miraculously spawned a series of games that are all far superior to it, off the back of one little feature. and because of that it is Historically Significant and thus i felt the need to play it for the first time in the year of our lord 2022.

maybe i'm a bit off the mark calling it a "little feature" because the crashes in this game are basically the only thing that sets it apart from being the most generic racing game of all time, and also there was a pretty decent emphasis put on them. but compared to the later games with their crash modes and far more detailed damage physics, the crashes in this game feel like a paltry little addition to the racing formula. and yet, as tame as they feel now, they were the main selling point back in 2001.

honestly they're kind of a gimmick that breaks the flow of gameplay, further exacerbated by the frequency with which they happen because the crash "detection" is super oversensitive and will often wreck you from a light tap. later burnout games improved this by adding features like aftertouch and crashbreakers, but here they're just kind of annoying as all you can do is watch your crash get replayed from different angles while your opponents fly past after you slightly scraped a car. it all feels very purposeless, something that was bound to age poorly because its only draw was "look how cool the crashes look with our 2001 technology."

aside from the crashes, burnout plays much like an arcade racing game - as in a literal arcade game - translated to consoles. actually my friends were surprised it was not literally an arcade port. you've got a few tracks, a small selection of cars graded by their "difficulty" to drive - just like sf rush! - and there's even a constant countdown timer in races which is extended by checkpoints. tacked onto this is a means of progression in the championship mode, which consists of four 3-race "grand prix" events and 2 "marathon" events. completing each grand prix unlocks a one-on-one "face off" event which earns you an unlockable car.

and that's pretty much it! the game is very barebones in terms of content. you have 5 generic cars unlocked at the start, and there are 4 unlockable cars - two of which are competitive, whereas the other two are large, heavy, impractical vehicles that are basically just for "fun" only they aren't even good for that since they crash almost as easily as any other car. ultimately the unlocking of cars is kind of irrelevant unless you want more variety, since the muscle car is unlocked from the start and it's arguably tied for the best car in the game.

aside from that, there's a fair amount of tracks, but only 5 unique locations. the game pads itself out using variations that are reversed or at a different time of day, although they also have slightly different layouts so they feel reasonably "different" to drive. the designs of the tracks are honestly pretty solid, although brought down by extremely questionable scripted traffic decisions. the traffic patterns in this game are pre-set, meaning that there will always be traffic in the same place on each track depending on what lap you're on. of course criterion apparently thought it would be funny to frequently do things like putting two cars crossing an intersection at the same time or a passing bus blocking it completely, which are nearly impossible to avoid. realizing that the traffic is scripted and that these things were done intentionally as opposed to just being bad luck made them more infuriating.

of course i also have to talk about the "marathon" tracks, which combine all the courses in a given region (3 american tracks, 2 european tracks) to form one massive track. they're a neat idea! i think it's cool to have all these interconnected courses as a sort of endurance race, taking 12 minutes to complete the euro marathon and 18 minutes for the usa marathon. the problem comes when one crash near the end can force you to do those 12-18 minutes all over again, even if you drove completely perfectly the whole way until then. because at that point the marathon races stop being "a neat idea" and instead become a thoroughly miserable experience.

yes it's time to talk about the rubberbanding. it is extremely blatant. later games would at least offer you the illusion of making a gap, since they constantly remind you how many seconds you are ahead (or behind). this game does no such thing. no matter how fast you are, the opponents will be right behind you. if you crash, you WILL get passed unless you're lucky enough that the ai crashes into your wreckage. but maybe even more egregious is that once they get far enough ahead of you, the rubberband snaps. see, the ai is actually kinda neat in that they also make mistakes and crash into traffic which helps equalize the races. the problem is the traffic only spawns around the player, because why waste processing power calculating the paths of cars that the player can't even see? what this means is that once the ai is too far away for traffic to spawn, they can just speed off without worrying about crashing and get farther and farther away with no hope of catching up.

rubberbanding aside, the actual racing mechanics of this game are occasionally fun but mostly pretty mediocre. the driving physics aren't the worst i've played in a racing game, but they tend to be slippery and imprecise, especially when you're trying to drift, and very numb otherwise. there's not really much else to it. you can't take opponents out like you would in burnout 3, but you can perform a pseudo-takedown by shoving them into traffic, which is about as exciting as this game gets aside from when you're boosting. boosting is probably the only thing that sets this game apart aside from the crashes, and naturally became another one of the series' signature mechanics. and here we find another problem with this game.

your boost meter, filled by driving in oncoming, drifting, and near-missing traffic, fills WAY too slow, and is very easily taken away by a single crash. also, you can only start to use boost once the meter is full. so you barely get to use boost - i tended to get boost once per lap if i was lucky, and occasionally i'd go a whole race without getting to use it at all because whenever the boost bar was full or nearly full i'd get screwed by traffic and lose it all. which sucks because it's when this game's driving really gets fun. evidently, the later burnout games realized this, and allowed & encouraged far more frequent usage of boost, resulting in altogether more fun gameplay. good job criterion!

there is another mechanic at play with the boost here, however. if you burn through the whole meter without letting off the boost button, you do a "burnout" which by default restores the boost bar to about half. if you do so and also stay in oncoming traffic the ENTIRE time, it will actually fully restore your boost, meaning you can keep going and chaining burnouts together. which is neat in concept but also goads the player into making dumb decisions while trying to chase that high, since the fact of the matter is there's very few situations in the game where you can actually use a full boost bar nonstop without crashing, and even fewer while staying in oncoming. but even knowing that doesn't stop you from trying because boost = fun = happy and it ends up leading to heartbreak when you crash and now have no boost at all.

from a technical perspective, the game is nothing to write home about. its best aspect is its solid 60 fps framerate, which helps elevate its sense of speed and fluidity, no doubt aiding its novel perception in the eyes of the gaming press circa 2001. this comes in exchange for graphics that are exceedingly average in a post-gran turismo 3 world, alongside a very generic aesthetic style and ui that certainly doesn't shake off the feeling that this is an acclaim-published budget title. to its credit, the environments and different time of day variations look fairly nice.

it's a miracle that boost does feel as fun as it does considering there is almost no visual or audio feedback - you've got the plainest looking meter youve ever seen, no flames from the exhaust, no burning sound effect or really any change besides more motion blur and the music fading to a thumping heartbeat. the engine sounds are very flat-sounding to the point where i don't remember a single time i even noticed them.

speaking of the music, it doesn't really help fill the void left by the sound design as it's some of the most utterly inoffensive and bland "racing game music" i have heard in a game. it wasn't bad or annoying at any point but it also made basically zero impression. there was also a pretty wack attempt at "dynamic" music mixing. i noticed multiple times when the music went silent for a moment before returning in an attempt to loop. additionally each location has a "normal" and a "dramatic" music track, and it abruptly switches to the latter usually after crashing on the second or third lap. the way it switches is really jarring and pulled me out of it when i was actually kinda vibing to the normal music.

i'm grateful to the original burnout for setting the foundation for the series that would eventually produce imo the greatest racing game ever made. but i'm gonna be 100% real: there is just no reason to play this nowadays. maybe if you just want to experience the tracks... but aside from that there's basically nothing here that isn't massively improved upon by the sequels. not even really a weird quaint early-series charm to it. it's basically a nothing-game. you can complete it in 4 hours and there's very little reason to come back to it afterwards. god bless acclaim for being desperate enough to let this happen and also get a sequel.

4.7/10

My copy of Burnout 1 arrived yesterday and first impressions are mixed. Graphics are good. Presentation is fairly basic. The music was bland rubbish that didn’t seem to fit the adrenaline rush gameplay. I turned that off pretty quick. The actual driving is fun. A nice sense of speed, especially using the internal view. Handling is generally good, but I’m yet to fully understand the drifting mechanics.

So far I’m finding the game as frustrating as it is fun though. It takes ages to build up your Burnout bar - in a three lap race lasting around 8 minutes, I’ve been lucky to fill my bar once. And just one little crash can wipe out quite a lot of what you’ve already built up. Sometimes you drive really well, weaving in and out of traffic at full speed, and yet your bar barely fills. Often a crash will see all of your rivals speed past you leaving you in last place. The timer can be quite tight and seems unnecessary when you already have a ranking requirement in each race and limited credits to finish a championship. Several times I have run out of time despite not being in last place. In fact , after a couple of hours play, I’ve yet to complete the first championship - I was on the last lap of the third race and the game crashed as I ran one of my rivals into the central reservation.

The lukewarm-to-cold reviews on this really almost put me off of trying it, despite really liking Burnout 3 as a teen (and adult, when I replayed it some years ago). I went ahead and tried it anyway, and boy, is it an exhilarating game. There is an enormous amount of butthole clenching to be had here as you hit the highway with 3 other people with a death wish, going triple the speed limit into oncoming traffic and trying to trip one another up and not lose your own life in the process.

Out of all the racing games I've played I'd say this one probably does the best job of capturing the feeling of being a cold blooded psychopath (in a good way?). At times you feel downright cold inside blasting past swerving civilians, and taking extreme delight in noticing that the guy who was catching up to you is now flipping 20 feet in the air behind.

Contrary also to a repeated opinion in the other reviews, I actually don't think the handling is bad at all, but I have a guess as to why people are saying so. The handling on the "easy" car, the first selection, is atrocious. Do yourself a favor and just go to the "hard" cars immediately. The truck is slower but offers a much better camera angle (higher) and so that will be your advantage. The muscle car on the other hand is very fast, handles probably the best in the game, but has a very low viewpoint by comparison. Either one can win races, but I found the muscle the most effective. You can also complete Face Off 2 to unlock the Roadster, another very effective and well-handling car.

The game also culminates in a very fun ~18ish minute race, 3 laps of the longest track you've seen which winds through just about every other track you've played so far. This gives you a long time to bask in the wonderful feeling of deep flow this game gives, just dodging, racing -- it's honestly joyous. Some of the most fun I've had in a game in a long time, just being allowed to play without any breaks over this extremely long race and soak it in.

The reason I don't give this game 5 stars is that it has two weakpoints. For one, it lacks content. I played the every GP and unlocked every vehicle by doing the 1v1 Face Offs in roughly 2-3 hours (I lost track of time, but something like that). That being said, this could also be construed as a strength, as I enjoyed playing this a lot, and it was over before it could wear out its welcome. If you really want to, you can tinker with the Time Trial and Survival modes, racing as fast as you can or as long as you can without crashing, while earning points for doing dangerous stunts.

The second downside is the rubber-banding AI. This is a pain point in any racing game, and it can be very frustrating. Luckily, it's not that bad here, as if you are being followed closely by an AI and crash, they will almost certainly all 3 pile up behind you, leaving you still in the lead on respawn. Even more so, at times I crashed, was passed, and still somehow respawned infront of the other drivers. All in all, if you're driving one of the fastest cars, you're never going to be out of the race as long as you keep a good pace and don't crash. You'll catch up eventually, and the AI will have a hard time overtaking you, so just... don't crash and the rubber banding won't be an issue.

I definitely recommend this one. I understand that the newer ones evolved the formula and they're good too. But this was a lot of fun. I'll play it again some day.

It's always really interesting to go back to the first entry of a game series in order to see where things started. I played Burnout in the early pandemic days of 2020, after a childhood and teenage years spent with 2, 3, Revenge, Dominator and Paradise in varying amounts. I was bored, looking for something to play, and I quickly came to a realisation.

Burnout 1 sucks.

It's the most generic and boring arcade racer you'll ever play, with the world's slipperiest controls and only contains Burnout's iconic crashes as a way of blindsiding the player and allowing the AI to get ahead to the point of breaking the rubber band that should prevent them from getting impossibly far ahead. Just play 2 onwards, Burnout 1 is essentially Burnout in name only, and it shows.

Fun arcade racer. Really captures that feel of excitement as you barrel down the road at a trillion miles an hour into oncoming traffic. The tracks are long though, and you can have a race ruined by a sideswipe near the end which can be frustrating, especially considering the fact that you have a limited amount of continues. The crashes are definitely the highlight, slamming into stuff always is fun to experience thanks to the good sound design and physics. Overall, it's pretty light on content and in some ways feels like it could be a tech demo for the renderware engine but i still had a good bout of fun with it.

Yikes.
Now, I get it, old racing games have it stacked against them, but this game is violently bad. There's little to no content here to enjoy, the driving is bearable but twitchy, the cars and tracks are pretty boring, and the entire crashing mechanic almost renders the game unplayable.

Criterion had no idea what they wanted to make here - crashing is glorified, to the point that your car making any kind of physical contact immediately takes you out of the race, never to catch up to first place again. Limited continues pour salt in the wound of the inability to actually win any races thanks to how violently the AI rubberbands, always breathing down your back and ready to end your entire run at a moments notice.

For the time, the game looks and drives fine, but everything else stops this game from being any fun at all. The boost mechanic is completely useless, for instance - it just causes you to crash instantly, and the AI just rubberbands to remove any distance covered by your boost anyway.

I couldn't stomach this game even when it was all I had for my PS2 as a kid, and even today, actually understanding the mechanics, I find it to be an abysmal first draft that will hopefully at least become playable in future iterations - I've heard good things about 3, and I'm interested to see if it's actually any good, or just rose-tinted glasses once again.

Burnout is a racing series, and its legacy is nothing short of excellent, having reshaped other racing franchises after it (such as Need for Speed, of which Criterion now works on).

The original Burnout, released in 2001, however? It's relatively harmless.
It's clear when you enter into this title that Criterion had yet to find that secret ingredient nor are they in their element. It almost barely feels like a Burnout game in contrast with later titles like 3 or Revenge. Crash modes, a Burnout staple, are also lacking in this title.

So what does the original Burnout bring to the table? A fair bit. Having been built off of arcade racer roots, the majority of Burnout's gameplay is relatively standard for the time. Think along the lines of Daytona USA, or alternatively, San Francisco Rush. The main distinguishing feature, as tame as it appears in this title, are the crashes. There’s a pretty decent emphasis put on them as well. But when comparing to the later games, of which contain far more detailed damage physics and additional gameplay mechanics surrounding them, the crashes in this game feel like a paltry little addition to the racing formula. Despite this, it was the main selling point back in 2001.

Here, it would be hard to not call it a gimmick that breaks the flow of gameplay. You will also be frequently crashing a lot, as the crash "detection" is super oversensitive in this title and will often wreck you from a light tap against a vehicle or adjacent wall. Later Burnout titles refine the concept by adding features like aftertouch, impact time and crashbreakers, but all you can do in this title is watch your crash get replayed from different angles while your opponents fly past after you (more than likely) accidentally slightly scrape another car on the road. A symptom of having to sell 2001 technology.

Boosting is another feature that distinguishes Burnout from the rest. You are given a meter which can be filled by driving in oncoming, drifting, and near-missing traffic, fills a bit too slow for what it is worth and can be very easily taken away by a single crash. You can only start to use boost once the meter is full. As a result, you barely get to use the boost - I tended to get a boost once per lap if I was lucky, and occasionally I'd go a whole race without getting to use it at all because whenever the boost bar was full or nearly full I'd get screwed by traffic and lose a good chunk. It sucks because getting a full boost is when this game's driving really gets fun. Evidently, the later burnout games realized this and not only allowed & encouraged far more frequent usage of boost, resulting in altogether more fun gameplay, but it also refined the boosting mechanics in general. Good job on you. Criterion!

There is another mechanic at play with the boost here, however. This mechanic, from what I can gather, is only present in this game. If you burn through the whole meter without letting off the boost button, you receive a "Burnout" bonus which by default restores the boost bar to about half. If you do so and also stay in oncoming traffic, near-missing cars the ENTIRE time, it will actually fully restore your boost, meaning you can keep going and chain these burnout boosts together. It’s neat in concept but also goads the player into making dumb decisions, since the maps are designed in such a way there it’s quite hard to use a full boost bar nonstop without crashing, and even fewer while staying in oncoming. And knowing that doesn't stop you from trying because you’ve already determined that “boost = fun = dopamine” and it ends up leading to heartbreak when you crash and now have no boost at all!

It's a miracle that boost does feel as fun as it does considering there is almost no visual or audio feedback - you've got the plainest looking meter you've ever seen, no flames from the exhaust, no burning sound effect or really any change besides more motion blur and the music fading to a thumping heartbeat. The engine sounds are very flat-sounding.

Aside from that, you've got standard arcade racer fare – a few tracks, a small selection of cars graded by their "difficulty" to drive – and there's even a constant countdown timer in races which is extended by checkpoints! There is a means of progression in the championship mode, which consists of four 3-race "grand prix" events and 2 "marathon" events. completing each grand prix unlocks a one-on-one "face off" event which earns you an unlockable car. Retrying in championship mode even works on a credits-based system to fully hone in on the arcade racer inspiration. You’d swear that this game was initially an arcade game converted to consoles.

As a result, the game is very barebones in terms of content. You start out with 5 cars unlocked at the start, and there are 4 unlockable cars - two of which are competitive, whereas the other two are large, heavy, impractical vehicles that are basically just for "fun", depending on if you’re lucky enough to not even scrape other cars with your sheer size.

Rubberbanding is extremely blatant. Later games would allow you to make a gap against your opponents, and the game will happily remind you how many seconds you are ahead (or behind). This game does no such thing. No matter how fast you are, the opponents will be right behind you. It’s almost Mario Kart 64 levels of rubberbanding. You have to hope that you're lucky enough that the AI opponents bother to crash into your wreckage. This rubberband will snap, however, should the opponent get too far away from you. The AI programming is actually kinda neat in that they’ll also make mistakes and crash into traffic to help equalize and make races more fair. The problem is the traffic will only ever really spawn in the player’s general vicinity, because why waste processing power calculating the paths of cars that the player can't even see? What this means is that once the opponent is too far away for traffic to spawn, they can just speed off without worrying about crashing and will get farther and farther away with no hope of catching up.

There’s also the music, it doesn't really help fill the void left by the sound design as it's some of the most utterly inoffensive and bland "racing game music" I have likely ever heard in a video game. It wasn't bad or annoying at any point, but it also made basically zero impression.

I'm grateful to the original Burnout for setting the foundation for the series that would eventually produce some of the greatest racing games ever made. But unless you’re really interested in the series’ origins, there is no real reason to play this nowadays. maybe if you just want to experience the tracks and how boosting works... but aside from that there's basically nothing here that isn't massively improved upon by the sequels. Not even that usual weird quaint early-series charm most franchises have in their early years. It's basically a nothing-game. you can complete it in 4 hours and there's very little reason to come back to it afterwards.

Having understood how the game’s publisher, Acclaim, was suffering in these years prior to their bankruptcy in 2004 brings you to one single conclusion: thank the heavens Acclaim was not only desperate enough to publish this, but also ask for a sequel to the game.

It’s a fine racer but they clearly hadn’t found their secret ingredient which is why it barely feels like a Burnout game and overall came off as a bit dull. I mean there isn’t even a crash event in this game which I think says it all.

I like the handling of the cars but only being able to use your boost once the meter is full (which takes quite a while and often doesn’t happen at all), takes away the high octane gameplay of later entries and gives us a fairly standard racing title which visually isn’t that appealing and the races take far too long. It’s not a bad game by any means, I think it’s actually well made for its time but I have no desire to complete it.