A few years ago Three Fields Entertainment was founded from the previous founders of Criterion, creators of the phenomenal Burnout series. Dangerous Driving is their latest attempt to recapture the essence of the series and for the most part, they mildly succeed.
Dangerous Driving
Developer: Three Fields Entertainment
Price: $30
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Dangerous Driving is split into six career modes, with each one featuring a specific car type: Sedan, SUV, Coupe, Supercar, Hypercar, and Formula. Three Fields Entertainment previously brought back Burnout’s classic “crash mode” in their previous two Danger Zone games, and Dangerous Driving brings back the rest of the more racing focused modes. Each career has around a dozen races featuring classic Burnout modes like road rage and elimination. The game even throws in some Need for Speed spice with its pursuit mode, which sees you take the reigns of a police car as you race to take down fleeing criminals. I really would have liked for them to have included a crash mode here instead of keeping it in Danger Zone, but what’s here is more than enough to satisfy.
The driving, capturing that very “arcadey” movement, feels tight and there’s nothing quite like pulling off a perfect drift around a corner. In typical Burnout fashion, the game is built around slamming into your opponents and gleefully watching as the camera slows down to dramatically show the carnage of them wrecking. However, takedowns can become quite frustrating since your car continues to move during the cinematic and the game has a nasty habit of putting you in the path of an oncoming vehicle, without much time to avoid it and causing you to wreck. There’s an option to turn the takedown camera off which alleviates this problem, but then what’s the point of playing this game?
In what’s an evolution of the series’ trademark takedowns, crashes are now persistent throughout the race. This means that when you or an opponent wrecks their car, that vehicle will stay there for the remainder of the race. It’s a neat addition to the formula that unfortunately introduces its own issues later.
The game’s career mode also feels like a slog because you’re stuck with a specific car for the entirety of its dozen or so races before the game will let you move on to the next car. When the realization kicks in that you have to repeat this cycle for each of the six-car types, repetition bares its ugly fangs. They seriously could have removed the SUV and either the coupe or sedan classes and the game would be better for it because they honestly don’t feel that different from each other; or at the very least don’t separate careers by car types but instead by difficulty and have a mix of vehicles to play within each career tier. Being structured this way just makes it feel like padding and I honestly don’t really want to have to go through nearly 40 races before I can play with the fast cars.
Now even if you ignored those issues and focused on how fun the driving is and the fantastic sense of speed you get from the game, what absolutely brings down the entire experience are a host of issues that alone could be forgiven but when combined together turn into something you just can’t ignore. First off, this game is clearly made on a budget and that’s made evident from the get-go with its very placeholder looking menu screen. That’s fine though, but it’s made especially clear when you actually start racing and notice there’s no music whatsoever, giving the game an almost eerie dystopic feel to it. You’re just silently racing through these tracks that vastly overstay their welcome which is another issue. To me, a good race in a game should last around two minutes, three at the max; Dangerous Driving regularly has races go well past the five minute mark and the length is made even more apparent by the realization that you’re just sitting there in silence for five minutes since there’s no music to help distract you. The 1-on-1 face-off mode in particular is where this issue is at its most glaring since you can easily outpace the other driver leaving them hopelessly behind you (I once had a near 50 second time difference between me and the other driver) which leaves you having to casually drive for over five minutes in silence without another car to worry about. Now the game does feature Spotify integration expecting you to make up for the game’s lack of a soundtrack, but you need a premium Spotify account to make use of the feature. Otherwise, you’re stuck racing in absolute silence for an agonizing amount of time.
It also doesn’t help that the tracks themselves lack any sort of personality or distinctive visual landmarks, so you never really even have a good sense of how far along in a lap you are. While on that subject, the previously mentioned persistent wrecks, while a neat idea, causes an issue here. Since the entire appeal of this game is to turn the other cars into a burning wreck, that means you’ll basically turn the track into a minefield of wrecked vehicles. And since races go on for so long, along with a complete lack of a mini-map, there’s no way for you to make a mental note of where these wrecks happened. It also doesn’t help that when you really start to go fast the game will start to have a slight delay on loading in the wrecks and incoming traffic, making it even harder to avoid wrecking your car and possibly having to restart a five-minute race. Because of all this, you’re incentivized to not wreck any cars so as to make it easier on yourself which is insane for this sort of game.
The Final Word
Dangerous Driving definitely has the spirit of Burnout, but it doesn’t exactly execute it in the way you’d want.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 3 out of 5 – Average
