Customer Reviews

Burnout Dominator

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

To avoid any confusion: Burnout Dominator IS NOT Burnout 5. BO5 will be an all-new, open-world game coming to PS3 and X360 later in 2007.

So what is Dominator? Is it worth the purchase?

It's vitally important to know that Dominator, despite being a totally new game in the long-running vehicle-mayhem Burnout series, is meant to be a return to the roots of the series.

The quickest way to describe the gameplay would be a mixture of Burnout 2, Takedown, and Revenge. The core of the series has always been driving dangerously to fill a boost meter, which allows you to then go even faster.

Dominator maintains this core, but in a welcome return to Burnout 2, includes the joy of boost linking. Once your boost meter is full (and turns blue), hit the boost button and off you go. What you can now do is continue to traffic-weave, fly through oncoming traffic performing near misses and tail-gating, and smash your opponents into obstacles. Do this enough, and you'll be rewarded another full boost meter (Burnout x2, x3, x15, etc). Top drivers will be able to keep the boost chain going for the entire length of the track, and Dominator is built around trying to attain this.

There is NO traffic checking. If you hit ANY civilian traffic - oncoming or not - you're gonna wreck, although you're still be able to aftertouch and/or crashbreak your destroyed metal carcass.

The gameplay flow is very similar to Revenge: a world tour mode takes you through various tracks, unlocking progressively faster car classes and increasingly difficult challenges. There are medals to earn, secrets to find, and rankings to increase. Dominator has three major differences from Takedown and Revenge, however: no online play (but there is split-screen, which is better than nothing), no crash mode (disappointing, but supposedly it's being reinvented for Burnout 5), and Record Breaker, a new single-race mode which lets you race any unlocked car on any unlocked track, and also lets you choose which type of race you'd like to run (single, time attack, maniac, etc).

Maniac Mode is a new race type that scores you on how much havoc you cause, and it's a lot of fun. Also new is the Signature Shortcut: smash a rival into a certain place on a certain track, and the resulting impact unlocks a shortcut for permanent use on that track in any mode.

Dominator uses the same game engine as Revenge, but it doesn't look quite as sharp. The game moves very fast, and has good sound and perfect control. The track design is structured around long turns, perfect to drift through, and each has its own unique feel, from a beachside course to a winding mountain road. The loading times are a bit long compared to the PS3/X360.

Dominator is a breakneck ride through the careening, eye-burning experience that is Burnout, and although it's not one of the best games in the series, it's a great way for its run on the PS2 to end.

It's inevitable that EA is tweaking the next generation of their incredibly fun Burnout series for next-gen consoles, so in between that time they give us Burnout Dominator. Combining events and features from Burnout 2, Burnout 3: The Takedown, and Burnout Revenge; Dominator delivers what longtime fans of the franchise would come to expect. Maintaining a great sense of speed and focusing a bit more on tactical elements this time around, Dominator is a fun blast while it lasts, but it doesn't have that meat & potatoes feel to it that the previous games in the series have had. Not to mention that it becomes noticable where the game was scaled back while being developed, and graphically the PS2 is really showing it's age. The cars look blockier than ever before, and the tearing is ever apparent on a regular television when going at high speeds. The Maniac Race mode is fun, and while this may be a filler game, some other new features would have been nice, especially considering the game isn't carrying a real budget price. Dominator can essentially be considered "Burnout Remix", and a cheaper price would have been nice for what you get here. That aside, Burnout Dominator is still a blast to play, and features much of what has made the series so great in the first place. This may very well be the last great racer for the PS2, and with Burnout 5 over the distant horizon, Dominator proves to be a very worthy distraction.

My son really likes the Burnout series. Plays it for hours. Also a great pick is need for speed carbon.

Don't waste your time buying just this one, buy all three from the amazon store at this link http://www.amazon.com/Burnout-Anthology-Playstation-2/dp/B001IX4CMA/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1230873252&sr=1-12 TRUST ME you will end up buying them all anyways. They are all fun and addictive.

Everyone knows burnout games are fast, everyone also knows that this is not Burnout 5. If you aren't expecting the next big thing in racing, but are prepared to have an amazingly fun time, get this game. First off, for a PS2 title, this game looks absolutely terrific, the environments are rich, and the cars look really real. This game continues the Burnout legacy of giving everyone a heck of a rush whenever they activate boost, and chaining burnouts is still as fun as ever.
A couple gripes about this game:

1. It isn't BO5, but then again, I knew it wouldn't be.
2. The music sucks. With tracks by two bands that start with "Army of..." and both horrendous versions of Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend", I usually mute the sound and put on my Sansa.
3. It is really easy to, if you crash once, get really disoriented and crash several more times in a row. This is no big deal unless you're racing, (which I don't do much of anyway)
4. Even if you (or your friends) are a bad driver, you can still dominate Road Rage mode just by crashing in front of a ton of cars and taking them all out. This is really annoying (especially when you have your 7-3 lead evaporated when your 12 year old cousin gets lucky like that).

Overall, if you own a PS2, you may as well get this game, as it is likely the final one to be released for the system. If you are one of the lucky souls who have a PS3 or 360, wait for B05.

Despite its flaws, Burnout Dominator provides good, fast fun that's worth whatever Amazon is selling it for these days.

The epitome of racing games. Use your burnout feature to smash into cars then watch them explode. There is a feature in this game that allows the player to slow down time after a crash to allow the player to "guide the crash" in to oncoming traffic. If you tap another player while you are crashing you are forgiven the crash and placed back on the track doing an automatic burnout. This keeps the game moving at high speed no matter how much you crash. The better you place in each event builds the player's points and eventually you can unlock more events and earn cars.

Though this game is not as good as Burnout Revenge, it's still a lot of fun to play even if it is missing some things like online play and crash mode. Still it's a fun tide-over till until Burnout Paradise hits the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. The crashes are still great to watch, and this time when you crash you can blow up your car to take out an opponent or to just raise hell among the commuters by destroying a lot of things. The soundtrack is still solid even if there are some songs that don't belong(Why is the girlfriend song from Avril Lavigne on here?). Burnout has always been the leader in car destruction, and this game proves to be no different, and still stands above pale imitators(Ahem, Full Auto, I'm looking at you). Crashing cars never really gets old if done right and this is a prime example of how it'll never gets old.

Okay, so you read the title, this game is just that, filler. It has the graphics of Revenge and it plays like Takedown. But, NO CRASH MODE!! That's right, its gone in this one. So is traffic checking. Now, like in Takedown, hitting a car from behind is a wreck not a car that shoots ahead of you like a pinball.

The control is nice, the graphics are nice, but it just feels lacking, like they threw it together to keep the hype for 5 alive. Also, the decent soundtracks from the last two are gone. This time, we get a mix of new and old songs, Jane's Addiction? Come on!! Oh, did I mention, FIVE songs are from Guitar Hero? What's up with that? Come on EA, give us some original tracks. Also, the non-guitar hero tracks range from Avril Lavigne singing in Spanish (Yeah, that's right Spanish) to some electronic nonsense. This soundtrack should have been left off completely, nothing great here.

It also has a new mode called Maniac, where you score points by driving aggressively, hmm, just like every other Burnout, I dunno. And Burnouts are back!! Woo!!! When you get your boost bar full and it turns blue, burn that sucker until you are out and you will get a Burnout and your bar will shoot back up!! Pretty cool, you can chain together a bunch of these and really fly.

Overall, its a good racing game, but it just isn't a finished product. Don't believe the hype, if you want something fun to play for a few weeks, then buy it, otherwise rent it or wait for Burnout 5 on the 360 or PS3.

Burnout Dominator for the PS2 continues the Burnout tradition with wild mayhem. You want to "drive badly" to earn boost points - which then lets you go super-speed and burn up the competition.

The whole point of this game is to destroy things. When you're racing you get points for riving on the wrong side of the road, for smashing into other cars, and general mayhem. Your aim is to rack up these points and then turn them into a super-turbo-boost which has you flying down the track.

Really the game comes down to near-missing your enemies as much as you can. If you hit them you always crash, and while you can try to steer your flying hulk into other cars, that's not nearly as much fun as driving.

There's a series of popular songs as the soundtrack which depending on your musical tastes is great or really annoying. The other sounds are simply the vrooming of the engines and the screeches of crashes.

The graphics are really where you make or break a driving game. You have to be able to see what's coming at you, especially at super high speed. I realize this game is on the PS2 and not a higher end console, but even so it is very dark and blocky. In many levels it is nearly impossible to know what is ahead and you have to make your best guess. This gets frustrating quickly in a driving style game.

Also, the "tutorial" levels are really annoying. You get interruptive pop-up messages right in the middle of high speed driving - numerous times - that keep jolting you out of the fun of what you're doing. They really could have handled that better.

I do enjoy smash-em racing games in general, and I know there's a lot of fun involved in games like this. I'd say to test other games of this variety though before you buy this one - you can easily find other similar games with better graphics and more satisfying smashing.

Rating: 3/5

the game is funnier , but the graphics are messy , you use to be able to see the cars ahead of time in the distance, now its not as fun as the other three games, also you get stuck on dead ends this is do to its messy graphics, basically you fell like you need glasses threw the whole game.