Be Excellent To Each Other

Made by a small developer called 'Three Fields Entertainment', who are all ex-Criterion devs from back in the day.

You want a spiritual successor to a real Burnout game, here it is!

It's pitched as somewhere between Burnout 2 and Burnout 3.

By all accounts the limitations of budget and team size do make themselves felt in some areas, bur Eurogamer have given it a 'RECOMMENDED.

Landing at £25 (or thereabouts) on all main platforms.

Note, 30FPS on the base consoles, 60FPS on the X/Pro, which is a pretty big deal for a Burnout game.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019 ... ack-thrill

Do want

No Dimrill’s plank, no deal.

I’ll wait for a sale.

I'll buy it because I love arcade racers and the early Burnout games gave me so many hours of fun, but also because I want to support a small developer who've managed to do something quite incredible considering the resources available to them. (The video linked above says the entire team is only seven people!)

They do seem to have just reused the old assets in a lot of cases

Seven people!

I've been looking at some of the reviews and it's getting a bit of a bashing. Scores are middling from 5-8/10.

It seems a shame cause the gameplay videos look like a decent facsimile of the old Burnout games.

Really does look like they've cut a lot of corners, and cheaped out on quite a few aspects.

A shame because there does seem to be some of what I loved about classic burnout, but I'd just prefer a rerelease/collection.

Cars in particular look pretty bad. The crashes are lacking in spectacle, the UI looks like it's real basic wordart, and there's litterally no in game music.

Clearly compromises have had to be made due to budget etc, but it seems like that's impacted the end product quite a bit.

For £25 I'll have a punt on it, a lot seems to be made of the fact you need a Spotify Premium account to get music in game, which I accept is something that won't be available to everyone, but there's nothing stopping people just playing music they like through another medium (although I accept it won't be integrated with the game in any way).

Apparently RPS have already done a custom Spotify playlist that works well with the game, and folks in the Eurogamer comments were saying they're finding what songs are on Spotify from previous Burnout games and adding them to their own custom playlist.

Beyond that the game does seem to have its share of glitches and bugs (which Eurogamer acknowledge), but they contend that none of them are game ruining or game breaking.

I'm a sucker for arcade racers, and the open world direction of games such as Paradise and FH4 don't add anything to the genre IMO, so I'll have a go at Dangerous Driving.

That's... Odd.

Cost-cutting measure, innit. The game has no licensed music but leans on a Spotify integration to fill the gap. Not a bad idea if you have Spotify, sucks if you don't.

I accept it's not what we're used to these days but a lot about this game shrieks that it was made a small team with a limited budget, depending on which review you read, the game can be either on the wrong or the right side of the actual game itself being too compromised as a result.

Specifically on the music side of things. I remember loving Flatout Ultimate Carnage on my XBox 360, and really got into it. It was made with far more resources than Dangerous Driving but clearly wasn't an AAA blockbuster style release, and one area that suffered was the licensed soundtrack. There wasn't enough of it to start with, and the good tracks were relatively few and far between.

I got my completionist head on and decided I wanted to do everything in the game, but the music started to grate to an unacceptable extent about halfway through, so I just turned off the music ingame (leaving the sound effects on), and played music from my ripped MP3 collection on my PC to accompany the game.

Not ideal, but it meant I had music I liked whilst I was playing the game.

Spotify integration is far better than that, especially since you can create your own custom playlists or use those created by others. IMO it's a neat way to solve a problem with not having the money to license a soundtrack. (And of course, it means there isn't a licence to run out a few years down the line which means the game loses a huge chunk of its music overnight, as happened with GTA4.)

Seems like playlists that might fit have been bouncing around for a while already....

They better have Avril Lavine’s ‘Girlfriend’ on it.

Not everyone has Spotify premium though.

Also it's not fine to just not bother with music because people might have some other way to listen to music.

Like playing a CD in the PS- oh

Sure, that's obvious.

It's also fucking insane!

You know what else didn't have licensed music? Stunt Car Racer. And everyone loved that.

All we had to do was listen to our favourite album by Transvision Vamp on a C90 cassette through an AIWA boombox whilst playing the game.

Same thing, different millennium. No biggy.

That’s like comparing the boot lid of a 25-year-old Rover and a brand new luxury EV.

Why did you choose the C64 version of Stunt car racer - its a C64 - it only has around 38k of usable memory of course it doesn't have music !

You know what else didn't have licensed music? Mohammad Ali. And he was great. Check and mate, losers.

I hope it was apparent I wasn't even being remotely serious?

Game looks a bit cheapy... still the comments section of that eurogamer review is hilarious, so thanks... 99 luftballons anyone?

By all accounts it's not that they didn't want to bother, they just didn't have the cash/and or the time/resource to implement it.

Of course I'd rather the game had a great licensed soundtrack than not, but if going without means we get a spiritual successor to Burnout, I'l take that deal.

OK I have Spotify Premium so I've got a fairly convenient replacement, I appreciate it'll be more of an issue for those without.

Yeah I'm surprised that they didn't just include some public domain classical music.

Hotline Miami was (maybe?) made by even fewer people and the creator went on Bandcamp searching unsigned young musicians to lend the soundtrack to the game. The game ended up having one of the most iconic soundtracks of all time and raised the profile of the musicians involved. There are definitely better solutions than a Spotify Premium account (which i definitely don't have).

I suspect integrating with an already available and supported API, such as Spotify, is a relatively simple and quick thing.

The other options mentioned would take more time and effort.

It makes it a significantly inferior product though.

I've got this pre-ordered so it should have unlocked by now. The lead dev was posting about it over on RLLMUK and it seemed worth a punt.

I suspect it wasn't a choice that was made lightly.

Well I shall report back later, the game is now installed and I've done the Spotify integration. Basically you just have to authorise Spotify within the game, it gives you a code to type in at the Spotify site and the game then gets permission to control Spotify, L and R on the left D pad for track back and forwards, and D on the left D pad for pause. You have to set the Spotify volume outside the game on the Spotify app itself, but that's dead easy as you can do it from the guide and not have to quit the game or anything.

There is also an actual music track as the game logos come up and for the main title screen, so it's not totally without music in its default state.

Yep, it’s a minor faff to set up Spotify integration but seems like a reasonable compromise to hit a price point.
It’s a decent enough game so far.... 6 or 7 out of 10

It’s not a minor faff for the 90% of people without Spotify Premium.

I don't have Spotify Premium. What is Spotify Premium?

I did the first ten events and now have the first GP ready to go. Managed to get all Golds or Platinums although a few of them took several attempts to do so.

It really is Burnout 2.0 to the extent that if you'd told me it was a HD remaster of Burnout 3 I'd probably have believed you.

The controls are a bit twitchy out of the gate so I knocked the sensitivity down a couple of notches, other than that I haven't had to touch a thing (not that there are really much in the way of options anyway). The Spotify integrations works excellently, the game recommends setting Spotify to 15% volume but I ended up at 20% Spotify and 100% game effects (for some reason Spotify is 'weighted' much heavier than ingame audio, so those settings made a pleasing balance of the music being nice and clear but also being able to hear the effects).

Presentation wise it's very stripped down, but again, it reminds me of the old Burnout games, they've even got the same sort of colour schemes and layouts and fonts and whatnot, the boost bar looks the same, 'Burnouts' have been renamed to 'Heatwaves', but overall it's so reminiscent of the original games I'm half surprised EA's lawyers aren't getting their daggers out (who knows, maybe they are).

Some of your old Criterion favourites are there, like randomised traffic in time trial events, unavoidable crashes on blind corners and suchlike, and once it put me back on the track after a crash only for me to be immediately taken out again, the ruthless rubber banding of old seems to have been massively curtailed though (at least early on), to the extent that I had a crash in first place towards the end of a long race, and retained first place once I'd managed to get going again.

Graphically I think it's fine, you wouldn't get it mixed up with Forza Horizon 4, however at no point did I think 'Blimey, this is an ugly game', quite the opposite in fact. The car models are pleasing, the shinies all seem to be intact, the scenery is nice, and the framerate stays (mostly) locked at 60FPS. Apparently the PS4 Pro does better in this regard as it does 1080p whereas the 1X does 1440p so a lot more pixels to shunt around, TBH I'd have preferred an absolute rock solid 60FPS. (I would have got the game on PS4 but I really don't like the Dual Shocks as controllers.)

So after all that waffle, what about the game?

Honestly, it's great, I just had 90 minutes of solid, exhilarating fun out of it and am keen for more. All your favourite Burnout modes are here and they all work as expected, it's a pure arcade racer and clearly has no intention of trying to be anything else. There is no story, no characters, no plot, no background, no setting, nothing. There's not even much more to say about the game, if you liked Burnout 3, you'll like this. (It's not Burnout 2, and it's not Burnout Revenge, I'd peg it at Burnout 3.) It does have the Pursuit mode from NFS Hot Pursuit though.

Loading times to and from events aren't bad at all, but most importantly the time to RELOAD an event is very quick, literally just a few seconds, so if you fuck it up early doors and want to retry, you're back at the start in no time.

I will say that the Spotify integration is a big part of it though, I just lobbed Chopley's Awesome Playlist at it and enjoyed racing to some of my favourite tracks off there, remove that from the equation and it wouldn't be the same at all. Also, the music carries on playing through the loading screens, car select screens, post race screens and so on, so if a track you really like is playing, you can just chill for a moment or two and enjoy it.

I'm feeling an 8/10 kind of vibe for it at the moment, but there's probably an extra 0.5 of a point there just because it's so cool to have my own curated music collection playing along with the game, and the game might get a bit too 'Criterioney' later on, so we'll have to be wary of that, I remember both 3 and Revenge started to get a tad ridiculous with the rubber banding and margins for error towards the end of their campaigns.

It's early doors yet, but I'd say it's a safe-ish buy at £25 if you liked the old Burnout games.

It's like putting CDs in the Internet.

Finished off the SEDAN campaign last night and started moving through the SUV campaign.

Negatives:

1) Whoever decided that leaving wrecks on the track is a 'feature' can (politely, I like Criterion and these are ex-Criterion folks) fuck off. There's enough random shit in these games as it is without smashing into a wreck on the last corner of a race that you had no way of knowing was there, and absolutely no way of spotting and avoiding.

2) The AI seems to have three 'settings', the lowest of which appears to have them content to just politely follow you in a pack, even when you're not boosting, which turned one race into a fairly relaxing sight seeing tour. (This actually worked very well, as Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb was playing.)

3) The scenery gets a bit samey, I guess it's down to another development time/resource restriction, there are no real cityscapes and suchlike. Everything moves so fast it's not a deal breaker, but it would be nice to have some urban environments.

Positives:

1) As per previous post, it does genuinely feel like a Burnout game, and everything that entails.

2) The Spotify integration is awesome and is really growing on me, to the extent that I'd probably start using it in other driving games that actually have a proper licensed soundtrack if it was an option.

I see a lot of people doing a positive spin on the Spotify integration. Both the RPS and Eurogamer reviews mention it as something positive. For me this is basically a game with no soundtrack, and for everyone else I know, since I don't know anyone with Spotify Premium (Not true, now I know Hearthly). It's even worse than those early Amiga games with "Sound vs Fx" option.

They could have:
- hired someone to make a videogamey soundtrack, like with every other game that gets released nowadays, most of them indie, although I admit this isn't "true" to the series.

- If they really wanted a pumping rock soundtrack, they could have searched for smaller unsigned bands that probably would have sold the rights for cheap or even free.

And besides this, still offer the spotify integration for anyone still interested.

There's plenty of indie games with soundtracks... Descenders is one that springs to mind and, whilst I don't know for sure, I can't imagine there's a big team behind that.

I'm not trying to pitch the game not having a soundtrack as a net positive, and maybe they could have arranged something themselves one way or another if the will was really there, but considering the entire team is seven people, how much manpower would they really want to expend in that direction?

If you've got Spotify Premium then the problem totally goes away, and TBH I'd say it's a better solution than an actual licensed soundtrack since the scope is damn near infinite.

If you haven't got Spotify Premium then yes, it's a problem.

Here are the custom playlists that are already on Spotify, including the developer's own playlist at the top left.

Yeah it's a small team and a small publisher.

For Hotline Miami (made on a shoestring budget) they just spent a load of time finding undiscovered artists who would do it for cheap.

There's also lots of public domain music.

It's a baffling choice.

MBUK's video DIRT used low cost bands as a soundtrack. It was shit

I can't help but think folks are getting a bit hung up on the music thing whilst the (IMO) more important news of HEY LOOK GUYS NEW BURNOUT GAME BY THE GUYS WHO ACTUALLY MADE THE ORIGINAL BURNOUT GAMES HAS BEEN RELEASED AND IT ONLY COSTS £25.

Sheesh, just got Spotify Premium for a month (£10) and play through the game, it's a traditional single player campaign style racing game, so you'll get it done in a month for a total cost of £35, and still be quids in from the cost of a new full price game.

Anyway, I played it more last night and thoroughly enjoyed it, and the custom playlists already up on Spotify fit the game magnificently. 'Born to Run' by Springsteen works rather well in a racing game, it turns out.

I'm broadly in agreement that I'd say it's a non issue. It's hardly beyond your capabilities to sort out some external music if you don't have Spotify.

Many games on the 360 I just replaced the music anyway.

I've just seen this... It might be helpful.

Free 60 day pass to Spotify Premium.

https://www.spotify.com/us/promo/thedirt/

It says it's the US but I've read that it's worked for people in the UK too.

You'll also get a Google Home Mini.

That's only for the premium family edition so £14.99 for the month. Still worth it though.

Hey, it is. Gaywood is a fucking liar.

HEY GAYWOOD YOU FUCKING LIAR

No, regular premium now

Spotify disagrees.