Crashing 101

Burnout® 3: Takedown™ is a racing game, sure, but it’s also a crashing game. Collisions are an essential part of this game, and the nice folks at Electronic Arts and Criterion have added a lot of new features to make your crashes as loud, expensive, and spectacular as possible. Here are a few hints on how to maximize your automobile carnage.

Visit the garage.

Choose Your Weapon
Before you enter any of the game’s crash sites, choose a vehicle. It’s a tough choice, one that will ultimately depend on your own personal preference. Smaller vehicles like the compact series will give you a great jump off the line, but heavyweights like the SUV definitely pack more punch once the collisions start.

If you’re playing multiplayer, stick with the faster cars that will allow you to reach the speed and cash power-ups first. You’ll also get first crack at any jump ramps along the route.

Compensate for a heavier vehicle’s lack of acceleration by using the Boost Start before the race begins. It takes some practice to get the timing down, but you want to floor it and keep it floored during the first two seconds (when the timer shows three and two). During this time, flick your brakes. When the timer hits one, the tricky part begins: in the first half-second, you must release the gas, and during the last half-second, you must floor it again. Start each run with a jolt of turbo speed that gets you out ahead of any non-boosting opponent, no matter how light and fast their car is.

Savor the post-crash slo-mo.

Living on Impact Time
Along with more crash sites, Burnout 3: Takedown also gives you more control over each crash. Pressing the A button during a crash puts you in Impact Time, a sort of slo-mo bullet time effect where you can steer your car a bit in total defiance of the laws of physics.

This opens up a whole slew of opportunities to involve more cars in your wreck (just aim for the highest concentration of vehicles), but it also brings some on-the-fly strategy to your crash runs. If you hit a jump, you can use Impact Time to steer your car toward the mid-air power-ups that will boost your score … but doing so could easily take you away from the biggest and most expensive oncoming traffic, where the money is.

Crashbreaker

Even better, crash sites now have Crashbreaker. This is essentially a bomb that you can trigger to blow your car to smithereens, taking as many of the surrounding vehicles with you as possible. The Crashbreaker can be obtained by driving over the right power-up or by reaching the crash threshold for each site … all you have to do is involve enough innocent drivers in your shenanigans to reach the threshold, and boom! Literally.

To make the most of these features, always keep your wreck in the middle of the road to catch other cars in your own fiery doom.

Crash for cash.

Bigger is Better, But More is More
Crash mode was introduced in Burnout 2: Point of Impact,but there is one very important difference in the way this new game tallies up your score. In those days, you wanted to go for the big rigs and busses because they were the most expensive items on the road, and a higher repair bill equaled higher scores. The final tally was then multiplied by the number of cars you involved, so if you caused a million in damage and dragged twenty other cars into your nightmare, you earned $20 million.

The new game still measures success by the amount of damage you cause, but now multipliers are available as power-ups. Also, the damage bills are slightly more manageable. Used to be you could wreck a bus and collect the full $100K or more of its value.

This time around, the bills aren’t quite so high and you’ll need to combine serious contact, multiple vehicles, and probably a Crashbreaker explosion to get every last dime out of public transport.

With so much crash action and online multiplayer via XboxLive™, Burnout 3: Takedown promises to give you all the extreme speed, twisted metal, and flying sparks you can handle.

Article by Pete Hutter