Think about racing games for a minute. What are some of the titles that popped in to your head? Maybe Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport? Maybe Mario Kart? Maybe Need for Speed? Maybe even Ridge Racer? But probably not Burnout. It isn’t very surprising that it wasn’t on your mind. Despite releasing seven games over the course of seven years in the early and mid-2000s, the series has all but been forgotten since the release of the stellar open-world racer Burnout Paradise in 2008.

After Paradise developer Criterion Games was moved off Burnout to help reinvigorate Electronic Arts struggling marquee racing series, Need for Speed. And while the Criterion developed Need for Speed games were excellent and Criterion’s best selling releases up to that point in time, it wasn’t enough to save the studio from decimation and now they are helping DICE as a support team on the Battlefield and Battlefront games. And it all but killed the Burnout franchise. That is until now. A decade after the release of Burnout Paradise, we are getting a remaster of it and for me, that signified a great time to revisit the Burnout series. And in the case of a few of the entries, check them out for the first time.

Criterion released Burnout in 2001 on the Playstation 2, with releases on Xbox and GameCube following in 2002. It was moderately successful, selling over a million copies and receiving decent critical response. I didn’t play the game at the time so coming to it in 2018 was something of a time warp. Burnout is first and foremost an arcade racer. And I don’t mean arcade racer to indicate that the game controls looser than a simulation type game like Gran Turismo, with a greater focus on pure speed as opposed to true to life car physics. It is those things but I’m being a little more literal in the description, Burnout features timed checkpoints and  a credit system that would feel right at home in an arcade cabinet.

When you jump in to a race, you are tasked with completing a race course on live streets against three opponents. Depending upon the race, you’ll need to finish at or above a certain threshold to advance. For example, an early race may require you to finish in at least third place, where a later race may need you to finish it in first. Burnout’s arcade roots though add another element to the mix though and you aren’t just racing against your opponents but also against a checkpoint clock. You’ll need to get to each checkpoint before the timer runs out because, regardless of where you are placed in the race, the game ends if the clock expires. The clock was originally put in to arcade racers so that you’d have to pump more money in to the machine to keep playing when you inevitably ran out of time (the industry’s first micro-transactions I guess). And here enters the credits system Burnout employs. If you run out of time during a race or if you fail to meet the requirements set for the race, you’ll need to use one of your three credits to continue playing.

Early on I found the clock to be an added level of stress that was more frustrating than fun. I didn’t know the courses, the turns were all new to me, the best line wasn’t visible yet, and this damn clock kept getting closer to zero. After I started learning the courses better, the clock became less of a factor but I can’t help but feel that it’s a relic of a bygone era that I don’t really like when I went to arcades and one I don’t want to return to either. It was totally unnecessary on a console in 2001 and feels even worse today.

Relics of a forgotten era of game design aside, the racing in Burnout is all over the place. Like most arcade racers, Burnout features an aggressive rubber-banding system to keep it competitive. I understand the need for such a system because it makes each race exciting, but it is also infuriating when you are doing a perfect run and one mistake costs you the entire race but somehow you can race like a buffoon and still be in it at the end. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I’ve ever found a racing game that feels just right in this regard.

What does feel right in the game is two things Burnout as a series is known for, highly responsive cars and spectacular crashes. The cars, of which there are just a handful of different types to choose from (including unlockables), feel great to drive. They speed by traffic and slide around corners with great ease no matter if you are driving the easy to handle Supermini or the squirly but powerful Muscle. And the crashes, with a few exceptions here and there, are a delight to watch, although infuriating in the moment (thankfully there is a crash replay). Some aspects of the crashes aren’t so delightful though.

The hit detection or responsiveness of it seems hit and miss. Sometimes, you can hit something that you’d expect would send you careening violently only to escape unscathed. And other times, you’ll lovetap a car and go spinning wildly out of control. It doesn’t help that your opponents are indestructible battering rams with regards to you. You can’t takedown an opponent, that will be introduced later in the series, and it makes for a weird dichotomy where you can oftentimes barely touch things without a crash but then play bumper cars with your opponent down a straight away.

And while it doesn’t impact the gameplay any, when crashing you are assigned a score based on the damage you do. The amounts seem completely random, with seemingly simple crashes racking up high damage tags and wickedly violent crashes barely registering on the meter.

There are a couple of other modes that can be played, including a Face Off mode which pits you against one other racer on a course. If you win, you unlock that car for play in the rest of the game.  Another mode is called Survival and it asks for you to drive a perfect run on the track, if you crash you lose. These are nothing more than diversions from Championship mode though as that is where the real progression and challenge lie.

And that is kind of it for what Burnout is. It is quite the bare bones package. I remember playing other racing games at the time and I feel they offered far more content. I could be dramatically wrong but I haven’t returned to many early era PS2 racing games much either, sans Gran Turismo 3. This is because the games just don’t look particularly great anymore and visual fidelity has come such a long way in terms of racing at speed that straining your eyes to catch the exact moment something gets drawn in so you can quickly avoid it can be quite a struggle. And I’m not going to lie, I was blind 17 years ago, my eyes have only gotten worse. I’m not sure what has aged worse though, the visuals or the generic action movie music that Burnout employs on its soundtrack. It is a comical how much it fits in with that era of game development though.

Burnout has some great core design features that Criterion rightly takes with it as the series progresses. But playing it now, it is hard to recommend this game to anyone except those looking to complete their collections.