The ultimate “blink and you’ll miss it” racer, Burnout 3: Takedown is the reason I don’t think I am allowed to drive. It has been 18-years of swearing at those damn pillars, busses, and every time I’ve missed the multipliers for the crash events. I recently returned to the series exclusive to the PS2’s generation, and it is every bit as beautifully satisfying and aggravating all in the same breath.

With pirouetting corpses of non-branded cars flying by as you speed into 1st place, nothing beats the true spirit of racing, killing other people so horrifically the only way to identify them is with their dental records. I am honestly surprised there wasn’t some sort of campaign by some bubble-wrapping psychopath turned talking-head on Fox News yelling “think of the children,” when it came to Burnout 3‘s rating. In America, it was T for Teen, but in the realistic parts of the world, it was 3+. Yet, some mental cases in Australia rated it M, because the nanny-state thinks a game is irresponsible but drive-through bottle shops (liquor stores) are fine.

As a series, Burnout is the greatest example of a series building on what came before it, all within 4-years of each other. Burnout (1) was just a typical racer by most accounts, not breaking the mold but not filling it enough to get there either. Burnout 2: Point of Impact added a little more into the mix, creating a puzzle game out of crashing a car and killing several hundred civilians with the aim of bankrupting your insurance company. While Point of Impact does improve on its predecessor, it never perfected itself into creating a whole new mold.

That is when Burnout 3 came along two years later, tightening up the crash events, refining the racing, and of course (with the help of EA) creating a soundtrack that ruined my music tastes forever. With whiny pop-punk, angry racing, and a whole lot of pixelated sparks as you speed down the highway, scrubbing the barrier on the wrong side of the road, I was in heaven. Of course, Revenge goes a touch further to refine the racing, the crash events, and the takedowns. Takedown gave birth to my love of the racing genre. That and the soundtrack grew up a bit in that year, featuring The Doors, of all bands.

That isn’t to say Burnout 3 hasn’t been dated. With modern hardware and even a few games, it is clear to see the spotty and angry 18-year-old screaming My Chemical Romance lyrics in the room. Playing on a 4K TV that is about triple the size of the TVs some of us were used to playing on in the mid-00s, I can’t help but yell at the lack of definition. It’s particularly aggravating when I can’t tell if what I just hit was sun-glare, or a bus that didn’t turn its lights on quick enough while the sun glared off of the highway. You’ve never heard swearing until you’ve lived next to me as I played Burnout 3 or Revenge.

Similarly, you can feel the age of the design: Crash events don’t have the camera panning over your soon-to-be final resting place, as you turn to ashes in the burning wreckage of an I-95 pile-up. Loading takes almost half as long as the PS4 when attempting to play Bloodborne. If you’ve got a new event or car from a crash event, but don’t have the gold, you can’t retry anymore, and there are other minor specialties of game design that we’ve ironed out in nearly 20-years. This is ignoring having to reprogram my brain to once again press triangle to go back, and not circle.

So why, as I put it in the Gear.Club Unlimited 2 review, did I call Takedown the yardstick of racing games? Unlike your Forza Motorsport, Gran Turismo, Need for Speed, or several other series, there is at least a gimmick to the racing. You aren’t just fighting AI that is trying to go fast, you are trying to kill each other by pushing one another into the back of trucks, the side of barriers, and halfway up a pillar on those streets of faux-Chicago. You are in a fight, and the AI isn’t too kind either. If you watched the last season of F1 and thought Max Vs Lewis was rough, I’ve done worse.

There is something special about the aggressive AI, the aftertouch effect once you’ve crashed, and the overall speed. However, returning after a prolonged break from the series, it is unmistakable I’ve misplaced that skill that nostalgia tells me I had to boost everywhere and kill everyone with a simple touch. This is the trouble with rose-tinted visions of our favorite games, we remember them for their greatness without knowing if they were always this slow, clunky, or even (dare I say it) unattractive at times.

There is nothing more cathartic in a racing game than to know the person who wiped out you two corners ago is now being removed from the flaming wreck of their car, and will be eating out of a tube for a while. It is a visceral reaction, the want to just jerk to the side a little and put a hot-hatch into a concrete pillar. It is unmistakably animalistic and wrong, but at the same time, Driver 3 in that last Gran Prix event put me into the back of a bus. They deserved to be cremated in mid-air as their charred remains spilled like a burst bag of sugar on impact again. Too dark?

There is a reason the highway backs up after a crash: We all want to sneak a look and have perverse thoughts of the horrific events that caused it. Burnout 3: Takedown is all of that at high speeds as you invent new profanity-laced names for Drivers 2-7. Make no mistake, there are bits that my adulation of Burnout 3 can’t erase, no matter many of those memories polished over those, now, dated design options.

Overall, the spark that Takedown had is still there, despite the overall improvement to a majority of our technology. I still say that a remaster is something I’d throw all the money at, though I don’t want a GTA: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition where it is outsourced and changed to appeal to the new audiences. All I want is something to clean up the visuals a little, so you can make out what you’ve smashed into by the time you’ve processed it. Maybe polishing up the menus a little, changing the back button from triangle to the more sensible circle, and figuring out this whole loading business would help.

Still the yardstick for racing games almost 20-years after its release, Burnout 3: Takedown is worth all the hype in the world for its equal parts fun and frustrating gameplay. The soundtrack is still the perfectly whiny pop-punk that defined so much of our music tastes of the early to mid-00s. While there is a push for photo-realism and a push for open-world live service games with about as much depth as a puddle, Burnout 3: Takedown will always outrace them. Mostly because it put them into the back of a school bus, killing everyone on the highway.

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Burnout 3: Takedown

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• DJ Stryker and Crash FM.
• Crash Events and Takedowns.
• Speed!

Cons

• 4K TVs add a few wrinkles.