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Burnout’s appearance on the Nintendo DS isn’t quite as impressive as fans are used to. The Burnout games have all earned critical acclaim and after EA took over publishing duties, it has earned commercial acclaim as well. Burnout Legends for PSP summed up the series into one cohesive package and managed to keep what made Burnout unique intact. Burnout Legends for Nintendo DS doesn’t capture the Burnout spirit and doesn’t provide truly compelling racing, either.
One area that Burnout Legends for Nintendo DS is faithful to the series is in the number of gameplay modes. You'll find the normal races, crash mode, road rage (where you need to build takedowns), time trial races, face offs (pink slip races), and pursuit mode.
Unfortunately, the game’s gameplay just doesn’t work. The cars handle very strangely. They bounce off walls sometimes but other times get unexplainably stuck in the walls. There is really no rhyme or reason to how they handle. The crash system which is such an important part of Burnout just doesn’t work. The crashes are not exciting at all because nothing really happens. It’s more like a speed penalty than anything else. Since crash mode and road rage depend on this so heavily, those modes are essentially nothing but filler. The game does a pretty mediocre job of showing a sense of speed. This is largely because of the tracks which are out in the open with nothing to compare your car’s speed to. For a Nintendo DS game, something like this is absolutely necessarily for us to be able to tell how fast we’re going.
The game’s visuals are somewhat impressive for the Nintendo DS. The car models are decent and do look good when they’re in the showroom. On the actual tracks they look only decent. The tracks are actually pretty well designed and modeled and do look pretty good. When you’re in constrained tracks (for example a street in between tall buildings) the game builds a sense of speed that is really impressive. Unfortunately, there are many open tracks where that sense of peed is just gone. This very negatively affects any racing. Moreover, the crashes just aren’t exciting. That’s one of the best features of Burnout and it is lazily recreated here. If the DS couldn’t handle it, they shouldn’t have been included. Thankfully, the framerate remains solid all throughout the game.
The game’s audio isn’t much more impressive. The sound effects are pretty subdued compared to what we expect from the Burnout series. Nothing really catches your attention despite all of the crashes onscreen which only shows that something is going wrong. The soundtrack is also rather poor with some sub par techno songs being included. Recent Nintendo DS have included actual music so this lack of quality is not acceptable.
Burnout Legends fundamentally fails for two reasons. The first is that the series is very much suited to technology. Even on the PSP, there were concerns that that system wouldn’t be able to handle the high-speed, crash-intensive gameplay of the Burnout series. The second is that the developers didn’t develop around the limitations of the Nintendo DS. Part of this is unavoidable since I’m not sure that the Nintendo DS can handle better crashes. But some of the tracks are out in the open, providing no sense of speed at all. Burnout Legends is at its best when it places you in a constrained track where you’re able to run for a few seconds and get speed and really get a sense of that speed. Of course, then a mediocre crash happens, you lose all the speed, and are thrown out in the open. That ruins it. -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Dec 7, 2005
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