14 DAY TRIAL // 
Do you want a game that can make you go 200 miles per hour while driving a muscle car and hit any vehicle that you please? Burnout's the perfect title for you, especially if you're a Need for Speed addict that's in for a little rehab, trying to see if there are any other driving games out there. Burnout Dominator was designed specifically for the PS2 and the PSP consoles and they rely on pure car destruction while racing on those hard traffic streets. In Dominator it's all about boosting speeds and doing damage and drifts to get points and unlock new cars.
Concept First let's make a round-up of what's gone! That would be the crash mode, the online play, the traffic checking and the replays. Although it seems that the original Burnout was ripped apart and the best elements were left aside, it's not quite like that. Dominator is similar to Burnout 3 Takedown, with a couple of new modes and a huge orientation towards boosting instead of bumping. You'll do both of those a lot if you want to get points and unlock new tracks and vehicles. There's a main single-player mode called World Tour that is split into 7 other sub-modes, each more destructive that the other. Since I mentioned these divisions there's also a separation happening in the classes of cars present in Burnout Dominator. You'll be driving classic cars, tuned ones, factory or tuned rides, hot rods, super vehicles, race specials and those neat dominator cars.
Back to those 7 sub-modes, the first one is the famous quick play that attracts noobs, also known as the Race mode. If you're not new, then you should try the Road Rage as it's a great race against time that will have you taking down as many rival drivers as you can in order to win and collect points. The Eliminator Mode sounds very familiar and it involves racing in a certain number of laps with the sole rule of having the last placed driver eliminated, one for each lap. Burning Lap Mode is a fancy name for a time trial that will only have you racing one lap. We bring out the big guns with Maniac Mode, as this is a fresh one, just implemented into the Burnout universe. You'll need to drive very dangerously if you want to get high scores, doing all the stunts that one can imagine with a four-wheeled vehicle. There are tons of drifts to be done; you'll see cars floating in the air, tons of near misses, oncoming deathtraps and many burnouts to be done.
What's a near miss? It's an event triggered by a car that's set on a collision course with you and it's going to be missed by a millimeter if you want to get points. Burnouts can be done once your flaming burnout meter is filled to the max and you'll notice that easily because it turns blue. You can do more than one burnout and you'll be chaining them during the race if you're going for the first place. These chained burnouts multiply the score you got so far, so they're worth it, both visually and for the sake of a demented gameplay sequence. Back to those sub-modes, you should check out the Drift Challenge if you've been a champion in those fine drifting sessions from Need for Speed: Carbon. It's basically the same challenge, with the sole requirement of making longer drifts and more feet will get you higher scores.
Add a couple of burnouts to that and you'll see your name in the official hall of fame. I mentioned what a near-miss is before and there's a game mode designed specifically for that. If you've joined this type of race, you'll be dealing with narrow misses of traffic cars throughout the competition. A little bit of focus and attention will have you scoring big time while your adrenaline level reaches the ceiling. One must practice his burnouts if he wants to succeed in a game that bears the name of a stunt done only by professional drivers that have the cars capable to do such tricks. Burnout Challenge is a mode that I consider to be the practice before the real crazy races and it's pretty basic: do as many burnouts as you can and smash everything around you, including your car.
The World Tour single-player is not the only single player mode available in Burnout Dominator, as there's a Record Breaker challenge that is only based on getting high scores and tons of points. While the many sub-modes I mentioned earlier required the completion of races and events to unlock cars and tracks, this is pure point-chasing and it's a good opportunity to show your friends what a good driver you are. There's no class or event restriction while playing the Record Breaker so this will be more fun than the World Tour, if you're the kind of gamer that plays a game for a couple of hours at a time.
Gameplay What can you get while playing this title? In most games, people do tasks to unlock certain items or events and Burnout Dominator is one of those too. What can a destructive driving simulator offer you as unlockables? Can it be weapons for God of War or the nude characters of Grand Theft Auto? It's none of those; instead, we get many cars and unlock new classes of vehicles. Boosting your speed is what you'll do 60% of the time in Burnout Dominator, because I really can't imagine a car doing 60 miles per hour smashing into another car that's going three times faster. There's a boost meter at the bottom of the screen drawn in the shape of an horizontal flame and as the time passes, the power builds up and you'll be able to get a huge speed burst that will allow you to destroy the other cars and chain lots of burnouts.
We must really thank the producers for creating an AI that can really kick some serious... trunk, because we would have been tempted to believe that the game's not fun if we were hitting sitting ducks. The other cars ram into you, push your car off the track and usually end the race in front of you since their speed bursts last longer. After the race is over, you'll get medals for your performance and since the AI is so tough, I had to settle with bronze for most of the time, but maybe you'll do better. When and if you compare Burnout with Gran Turismo, you'll notice that Dominator has considerably less tracks than "the best driving simulator". 12 different tracks and 8 locations will provide you with lots of fun and keep in mind that we're dealing with tracks based on the real locations, places like Tuscany, Bushido Mountain, Autobahn, Ocean Drive or Glacier Falls. They can be played in their normal version or in reverse increasing the replay value.
During the lengthy races, you'll come across a couple of special events called signature shortcuts; basically it's all about a car that explodes opening alternatives to one's route. The difference between cars can be certainly felt and you'll be able to tell if you're driving a Mustang or a tuned hot rod car. Players can drive using the D pad or the analog stick, it's their option, as both are good enough to give you full control of the car, specially if the vehicle has good responses to your commands. Remember that it's not all over once you ram into another car, because a slow-motion event will be triggered and the player will be able to spin his wheel around to hurt the opponent some more or blow his car up to smithereens. More deformation means more points and if there's a car behind you that is flying upside down because it was hit from behind, you'd better steer and watch some Hollywood-like moments. The gameplay is as juicy as the first Destruction Derby seemed to be when all of us were noobs in the Playstation universe.
Video If you've played Burnout on the Xbox console, you'll probably hate this, because on the PS2, cars look too flat and pixeled to appeal to the pretentious public. Surprisingly enough, the PSP version looks better than the PS2 one, but there are common defects that spoil the fun, such as a foggy view in the distance. You won't be able to handle the traffic because of this visual bug and you only have a millisecond to dodge or ram into the incoming vehicle. The tracks look great and rural Japan or the modern US courses are beautifully designed to suit their real-life counterparts. Don't look for the eye candy elsewhere, as it's hidden in those wonderful slow-mo action sequences that show every inch of the car's deformation during the crashes. You'll see sparks around the cars, while they're getting scratched on the walls and there will be trails of smoke behind you when you accelerate in the dusty levels. The burnouts are a visual delight; but nothing out of the ordinary for a gamer that played the Need for Speed series.
Sound Having a rockin' soundtrack in a game like this is a must if you want to get a proper adrenaline shot. No one can crash 4 cars at the same time while listening to Celine Dion, Alice in Chains, Avril Lavigne, N.E.R.D, Jane's Addiction, Killswitch Engage and many more will give you that little bit of insanity needed to get past Dominator's challenges. Every break, burnout, crash and explosion will be felt to the bone and this is that kind of game that will disturb your neighbors, because you'll be tempted to play it while using a modern sound system that features surround and a great bass. The cars sound different, especially because they belong to different classes and have higher or lower engine power.
Multiplayer The PSP version had a decent multiplayer and the fans went crazy for it, because it allowed up to six players to play thanks to a local or ad hoc connection. The PS2 has just surfaced and it features a poor multiplayer experience, excluding that fun online play. You'll now have to do with local offline multiplayer that still allows 6 players to compete, but split screen is so ten years ago and old fashioned and not everyone has a plasma screen to play it on. All in all you can create a pretty decent competition if you're hanging around with your friends and you're in the mood for car wrecking. A screen-splitting party can entertain a group of teenagers for hours, especially if they start chaining burnouts and discovering signature shortcuts.
Conclusion You'll adore Burnout Dominator if you've never played a game pertaining to the Burnout series before and you'll like it even if you've played all the prequels in this car-wrecking saga. Pure destruction and car parts flying everywhere, that's what you'll see throughout this title. Adrenaline increases at the same time with the burnouts as you'll reach high speeds in no time and every impact will become an event that seems to be taken out of a car-bullet time sequence in The Matrix.
