By staff writer Brenden Dalipe

Burnout 3: Takedown, or Burnout 3, is a game developed by Criterion Games and published by Electronic Arts in 2004 (yeah, a long time ago) for the Xbox, Xbox 360, and PS2. It’s where you race super fast tuners, muscle cars, and more in order to cause massive destruction to the city.

Crash, smash, and ram your way through races, road rages, and time trials in the Campaign to earn medals and rewards. By rewards, I mean new cars. Earn enough cost to state? A new car. Enough car takedowns? A new car.

Every time you’re about to enter an event, you get to pick the car you’d rather want to wreck the other racers with. The garage stores every single car you’ve been rewarded with, and any others you haven’t unlocked yet. Each car has a stat list, showing the weight and top speed of the automobile. (Hey! Here’s a tip! Playing a road rage? Get a car with a high weight. Playing a race or time trial? Get a car with a high top speed.) There are over ONE HUNDRED events, and 40 different tracks you can drive and total others on.

Critics and players alike have loved Burnout 3. Metacritic has given the game 94%, and Burnout 3 has received many awards, including the Spike TV “Driving Game of the Year”, and the “Most Addictive Game” award, given by fans. Halo 2 and GTA San Andreas were actually also nominated for this award — that’s how addictive Burnout 3 is… go and play now. Really. GO!

In the Campaign, you can drive in 3 different places: the USA, Europe, and Southeast Asia.

Even though there are so many things in Burnout 3 that are extremely awesome, there are a few flaws in this, exactly like every single game that ever existed. For one, the cars have no real name. They’re just called “Muscle Type 1”, or “Compact Type 1”. It would be better if you called it something real, like instead of “Muscle Type 1”, how about the “Stallion”?

Every car in the game has a name, and they’re based off a real-life car. The “Custom Coupe” is the Acura RSX, the “Fire Truck” is the American LaFrance, the “Assassin Coupe” and “Coupe Type 2” are the BMW M3 E36, the “Tuned Compact” and the “Compact DX” are the BMW M3 E46, and the “SUV Deluxe” and an extra car are the BMW X5 E53, for example.

Some extra cars include the AM General Metropolitan, Cadillac Escalade, Chevrolet Caprice, Chevrolet G-20, Chevrolet Venture, Damon Daybreak, Datsun 720, Expertise Icon, Fiat Panda, Ford F-350, Ford Freestyle, Ford Transit MkIII, Hino FE, John Deere 2130, and Land Rover Defender 90 NAS.

While it’s fun to play on your own on the Campaign or on free play, you can play with others locally, on PSN, or on Xbox Live. If you play together locally, you have to play split screen. You can play any mode on multiplayer, from time trials to the crash mode, where you take a car and create the biggest car pile-up you can.

Overall, Burnout 3: Takedown is quite the racing game. It had good graphics at the time, good control response time, good gameplay… you get my point. I give Burnout 3 a 9.6 out of 10 because the gameplay does get repetitive.
If you want to see what Burnout 3 is like in action, click here.

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