Tips and Tricks

Burnout® 3: Takedown™ brings aggressive racing to new heights. With five different types of crash-happy modes for both single-player and online multiplayer, you'll have no trouble causing a nice flaming wreck whenever you like. Here are a few hints for making the most of your motorized mayhem.

Scraping 'em off.

Watch Your Behind
Unlike most demolition derbies, where the drivers must preserve the engine in the front, Burnout 3: Takedown favors racers who protect their back ends. When two cars collide back to front, the one behind will survive and the one in front will take massive damage. If you're being tailgated by a vengeful driver, never slam on your brakes to crumple his front end—your car will suffer for it. Instead, swerve across as many lanes as you dare before applying the brake to get your opponent in front of you, then slam down the gas and the boost and give his hind end a good kicking.

Braking can also be a great way to escape a pursuer or duck out of a 100 mph multi-car shoving match—simply slow down to let the other guys duke it out and then pounce on them from behind for a quick multiple-takedown scoring bonanza.

Car, meet wall.

Drift Away
Note that drifting while being pursued is also a bad idea. Sure, it builds up your boost meter, but while you're skidding your car is more vulnerable to being hurled off the road, even by incidental contact with another vehicle … and in a game where aggressive driving is the whole point, "incidental" contact is the least of your worries. Using drift can be invaluable for getting out of somebody's way when they're on your tail, but be ready for some fancy maneuvering, because you present a much bigger target when you show someone the broad side of your car, one that they're almost certainly going to take a shot at.

As with braking, careful use of the drift can also turn a bad situation into a takedown for you. On those sharp turns, take the inside lane and go into your drift. Using a little fine-tuning with the steering wheel and some practice, you can squash your fellow drivers between your car and the railing or wall. Even if you don't score a takedown, you'll chalk up some points for Grindin' or Tradin' Paint.

The more, the messier.

Piling On
It goes without saying that you want to chain together as many takedowns in a row as possible—each successive crash adds big multipliers to your score. This is one of the few instances where you don’t want to go all-out aggressive. Instead, bide your time and wait for two or more opponents to cluster up on the highway within a few car lengths of each other as the race progresses. Then, hit the boost and plow through them one by one, taking each one down in turn. If you time it right, you'll score big and make the other drivers very angry. This is fun by itself, but it also opens the door for Escape points when they come after you later in the race (and you re-humiliate them by dodging and leaving them in the dust).

Finally, remember that winning the race by coming in first is still half of the game. In Burning Lap and Eliminator modes, you can't just smash things up if you want to win the contest. If you're way ahead in points and there are no other cars nearby, feel free to soar ahead to the finish line and clinch the victory … there will be plenty of time to wreck stuff—with opportunities to mock your opponents' smoking, charred wrecks—in the other game modes.

Article by Wendell Scott