Burnout Dominator

Burnout Dominator - (PSP PS2)
Developer: in-house
Format: PSP PS2
Genre: racing

The ferocity and frenzy of the series remains - but had our favourite racer shifted down a gear?

Less is more sometimes doesn't work - sometimes less is plainly well, less. Get rid of Crash mode and make the heinous crime of neglecting online play, and you just feel cheated. Ok, Burnout still holds true to the exemplary graphical race play of the original 3 versions to date but this is not the groundbreaking tarmac-chewer you'd expect from the EA brigade.

They've added a maniac mode and a World Tour so that your choice of souped-up machines offer new angles but essentially the gameplay's the same. Maniac mode returns to the good old days of Burnout mode - where dangerous, reckless and life-threatening driving is rewarded with Burnout Boost meter flames. In Maniac mode this is like playing the entire race and road rage in non-stop burnout, boosting your way into oncoming traffic and making the scenery (and your retinas) blur with the effort. If this doesn't have your blood pressure throbbing your forehead then nothing will - but once you're strained in this mode for a few goes the novelty wears off.

This time round though the attention is un-PC focused purely on the dangerous driving - no matter how many enemies you take out or how many high-inertia crashes you survive, the Boost bar won't budge. Whack it over into the opposite lane though and the situation changes. As with Maniac Mode, it's good for the first go but very quickly you'll want to explore better skills and tactics that just aren't there. Roll on the full next-generation version for the PS3 and Xbox 360 in the autumn.

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