Burnout Legends for PSP

The psychotic driving game Burnout comes to the PSP with "Burnout legends" and the transition actually delivers a pretty solid driving game.

Burnout is clearly the most destructive and chaotic racing game of all time. The idea is less about racing opponents and more about destroying just about everything in your path. There is racing involved, where you'll be attempting to take down your competitors in a violent fashion. Whether it's bashing them into walls or into other cars, or grinding them up against a guard rail. You see, Burnout involves no weapons at all and your power-house car is the only destruction mechanism.

The game is essentially a pixel perfect port of the console version. The cars all have amazing glare effects and the crash sequences are stunning but the environments are all very tedious and repetitive. You'll be pretty much racing or crashing through city environments during the course of the game. I wasn't asking for races on the moon but at least give me some variety other than cities. As I said, the big contrast in the games graphics are the crashes and explosions. Gas tanks and trucks are purposely put in your way in some races and you can even blow up your car after you crashed to create more chaos leaving dozens of cars erupting in a fiery blaze.

My biggest problem with the game is the modes or lack thereof. "World Tour" takes you around the world to do different crash courses. The thing is, there's only two things you can do. You can race while trying to take down other opponents, smash as many opponents as possible before the finish line, or, crash modes where you intentially run your car into oncoming traffic attempting to destroy as much as you possibly can which rewards you money and then a bronze, silver or gold medal (we'll call that 'havoc') This, is fun at times, but the damage has been seriously toned down strictly for it. Example, in any other race, the game is forgiving if you hit a rail or a post at a fairly high speed and you can most of the time simply re route yourself, however in this, if you so much as tap anything you'll be destroyed. "Pursuit" puts you as a cop attempting to ram a skilled criminal off the road before a set distance. Each mode is put into either the "Crash" or "Tour" category. Which should actually be flipped around. Racing is put in the "Crash" section, while the havoc events are put in the tour section. Racing is arguably the best part of the game, however, you'll soon realize that havoc events seriously outweigh the racing. There's probably 4 havoc for every 1 actual race. After all the tours, you'll soon be grieving for more races, unfortunately, there just aren't enough.

World Tour is the only thing that resembles any sort of career mode. It's split up by five different car types. "Compact", "Muscle", "Coupe", "Sport" and "Super". None of them are considerably different from the other in terms of racing or crashing and the cars for the most part go the same speed as any other car type, but for car buffs, you'll enjoy the large selection.

As much as I hate to say it, I feel it must be said. EA is lazy. You see, NHL 06' and Burnout Legends came out around the same time in Mid 2006 so therefor the soundtrack is nearly identical. This, however, isn't a huge flaw, the music is relatively decent and features mostly punk rock tunes.

It's no mystery, and if it is I'll establish it now, that Burnout games are known for their immense sense of speed. Unfortunately, this doesn't translate flawlessly on the PSP screen. Sometimes you'll be going extremely fast but because of the small size of the PSP screen it makes it hard to see what's ahead or in front of you more so than an actual Television set. Most times you'll be in first place and just about to cross the finish line when suddenly you'll rear-end a small truck because of your inability to see two feet over a ridge.

Burnout is a racing game where the controls are never an issue. Both the analog and D-pad can be used to control your car. For the most part you'll be driving in closed in highways or roads and your car is very responsive. The "R" button is used to initiate the turbo boost which you get by, you guessed it, taking down your enemies. The square button is used for the brakes or drifting around corners which is much better than being halted by a guard rail and then scrambling to reclaim your lead.


Besides World Tour, there's also Single Event and Multiplayer. Single event is pretty self-explanitory as you get to pick the game type and car you wish to use. Six racers can battle it out against eachother in Multiplayer in essentially the same modes as single player.

Your rewarded in the game with meaningless trophies that are given to you by achieving certain objectives like triple takedowns and taking down buses. As I said, the trophies don't give you any sort of feeling of achievement and you'll rarely even glance at them. There's also a unique feature called "Signature takedowns" meening a picture of the best takedowns you have done. These, are really anything but because the game decides what your best takedown is. After the picture is taken you can look at them in a photo album, cool right? wrong, the photo's are simply pre-made pictures that are given to you once you do a cool takedown according to the games standards.

Burnout Legends won't be ending shortly either. For those looking for a lengthy racer it certainly delivers. There's 175 events in all to complete, althought this may seem like alot, and it is, the majority of the events are Tours, which end up being very repetitive after a while.

Overall, the game delivers what it promises, burnout on the PSP, nothing more, nothing less, which is the problem. Fans won't be disappointed, but for those who are new to the series and or looking for a serious racer may want to look elsewhere.