Dangerous Driving (PS4) - please drive dangerously

Dangerous Driving (PS4) – please drive dangerously

The creators of Burnout return with an original arcade racer that has no time for braking or the rules of the road.

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Spiritual sequels are an increasingly common concept in modern gaming, where dormant franchises are revived in all but name – often by the original developers. Thats exactly whats happened with Dangerous Driving and its tempting to say that the only difference that makes is the name, except there is one other important detail its missing: a sizeable budget.

The franchise in question here is Burnout, which despite a remaster of Burnout Paradise last year hasnt seen a proper new entry in over a decade. The original games were made by British developer Criterion Games, who were bought by EA in 2004 and, well… you can pretty much guess the rest. Criterion were soon moved away from Burnout and onto the Need For Speed series, before being broken up and the majority of the staff moved to Ghost Games to reboot Need For Speed. (Which flopped, although the remainder at Criterion have had better success working on Star Wars: Battlefront IIs Starfighter Assault and Battlefield Vs Firestorm.)

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The original founders left Criterion in 2014 and via their new studio Three Fields Entertainment have been producing small scale games such as Dangerous Golf and Danger Zone in order to work their way up to Dangerous Driving – which comes very close to being an unofficial remake of Burnout 3.

If youve never heard of or played Burnout before then dont worry, its not going to take long to get up to speed. The series started back in 2001 and even then was an unusually old school arcade racer, a game that clearly remembered the glory days of OutRun and Ridge Racer and wanted to keep things just as simple and fun.

It did bring something new to the genre though, in the form of extreme vehicular violence. At first you were simply rewarded for dangerous driving, which built up your turbo boost meter, and then in Burnout 3 the concept of takedowns were introduced. These reward you for purposefully crashing other drivers and even provide an optional slow-motion camera angle to ensure the carnage is as much to your benefit as possible.

Thats Dangerous Driving in a nutshell, with the game offering nine different race types, from simple races to the finish to full-on demolition derbies. Theres no multiplayer, but thats been promised for shortly after release. Its clear from the bare bones presentation that Three Fields are doing the best they can with a limited budget and while theres a notable lack of city tracks or more complex visuals the graphics are silky smooth and exactly as fast as they need to be – although also occasionally a touch glitchy.

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The driving is a worry at first, with the initial cars handling like overfilled fridges skating across the road, but as soon as you get behind the wheel of a half decent car 20 years of boring driving simulators are all but forgotten. All of sudden braking becomes an optional extra and the racing line is nothing but a vague preference, as you play chicken with oncoming traffic to get more boost power.

Dangerous Driving (PS4) - takedowns have a hilarious amount of aftertouch

Dangerous Driving (PS4) – takedowns have a hilarious amount of aftertouch

Dangerous Driving is not a complicated game and thats a large part of the appeal. But theres a remarkable amount of variety between all the different race types, from simple time trials to races where you have to score as many takedowns as possible or survive an elimination fight and be the last car standing. And on top of that are police car chases and Survival mode where you have to survive speeding traffic without crashing.

Easily the best new feature (in that it wasnt in any of the previous Burnouts) is that in most race types the shelled-out carcasses of your previous kills remain lying where they fell, which is a great way to add some dynamic danger to proceedings – as well as the extra tactical consideration that you dont really want to be causing multiple takedowns on a difficult corner of your first lap.

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