Dangerous Driving bets that spurned fans of Burnout still want more Burnout made by the only people they would trust to make more Burnout. It's a skilled recreation, albeit one that forgets wild innovation and grinning novelty were as important to Burnout's identity as racing and smashing up outrageous cars. Dangerous Driving, ironically, is defined by familiarity and comfort.
There is a primal thrill in racing to overtake another vehicle. The neural electricity is amplified when you also smash into the side of the opposing vehicle. It reaches a climax when that vehicle careens into a wall and explodes into a million pieces. From 2001 to 2009, Criterion’s Burnout series made its name by complimenting fast cars with ridiculous crashing, creating a feature out of space that had only been reserved for a penalty. With EA’s marketing-driven preference for Need for Speed’s more sanitized and prosaic brand of racing, Burnout’s only appearance in the last decade was left to 2018’s remodel of Burnout Paradise.
Dangerous Driving, composed from a seven person team that includes ex-Criterion staff, is explicitly designed to fill the void left by Burnout’s absence. You race an escalating series of cars through the twists and turns of enormous road courses. Traffic is avoided while opponents are purposely smashed into and taken down. Driving dangerously—nearly missing other cars, barreling down the wrong lane, bashing into opponents—builds a boost meter. No one should ever step off the gas pedal and skilled players should always have the boost button held down too. Dangerous Driving carves a variety of gameplay modes from this basic premise. In place of a modern campaign and hundreds of cars is something closer to a true, focused arcade-style racer.
Progression is broken down into six car classes, each with a total of four cars with a dozen or so events. Winning events for each class of car unlocks Face Offs toward improved versions of that same car. Diving Dangerously starts slow, with Sedan and SUV classes ameliorated with slower opponents and lighter road traffic. Winning the class-ending, mutli-stage GP race in every class unlocks the next class. Coupes, Supercars, Hypercars, and Formula DD classes total Diving Dangerously’s garage of speed machines. As a neat bonus, each set of races also contains one or two preview races for cars and classes that have yet to be unlocked.
Events follow expected models. Road Rage sets a Takedown quota the player must complete under a time limit. Pursuit makes the player a cop who must whittle down health bars of the criminal cars they are pursuing. Shakedown is a course-based time attack while Survival is a checkpoint-based time attack, almost like Sega’s Out Run. Eliminator kills the last place car with every lap. Returning from Burnout 2 is Dangerous Driving’s most white-knuckle event, Heatwave, where the player is rewarded with a refreshed boost meter and a +2 MPH top speed for every boost meter that is consumed consecutively.
Lingering car corpses stand as Dangerous Driving’s signature alteration of the Burnout formula. Once a Takedown is performed, the shell of that car is left on the course for the remainder of the race. The opponent respawns and continues the race, of course, but the physical reminder of their failure remains somewhere near where it landed. This creates a minefield for races with more than one lap and presents the player with a new risk and reward system. Takedowns don’t seem to do that much to impede your opponent’s progress, and boost is rarely in short supply. Is destroying them really worth it?
Operating a vehicle in Dangerous Driving feels appropriately unrealistic. Almost every car seems like it goes 0-150 in two seconds. The drift mechanic, where the brakes are tapped around the curve, provides excellent tire-screeching feedback for the player. While wrecking is painful, Dangerous Driving rubber-bands its AI in earlier levels so the player always has a shot of catching back up (of course the reverse of this is they’ll always be on your tail regardless of how well you’re doing). There are times when Dangerous Driving’s handling almost takes on Daytona USA’s weird slot-car feel, where you can “see” the lanes cars are bound to, but it still provides a satisfying level of control.
The Aftertouch mechanic, where the player can hilariously push their husk of a car back into traffic after a crash, also makes a me-too return. While Three Fields Entertainment made this the centerpiece of both of their Danger Zone games, its inclusion in Dangerous Driving feels like an afterthought. Impeding AI progress felt pointless because they were always right back on my tail. I also have no idea if Aftertouch affected the speed of my own respawn. In every instance but Road Rage being in first place is the primary objective. Why would I want to fart around and maybe crash into the person behind me?
Dangerous Driving doesn’t do an especially great job at informing the player of its finer quirks. I learned the four cars in each car classes are suited toward a particular style only because it popped up in a loading screen tip. Thirty-one courses are carved out of seven huge tracks, but I never knew how long each would be before the race started. When I was having trouble seeing my car on the screen—Dangerous Driving loves rapid-firing large-font information at the center of the screen—I found a “Hide HUD” option on the pause menu…only to discover it only hid the HUD on the pause menu. Dangerous Driving operates with the assumption Burnout’s mid-aughts framework is still rattling around in the player’s brain. While this is probably true for a majority of players, this illiteracy seems insane for a new game in 2019.
I had a tough time with the field of view. I like to see everything in front of me, which most racing games accommodate with a hood or first-person camera. Dangerous Driving has a chase camera by default with first-person available by choice. There really is no choice; spatial awareness and smashing into people is central to the game and I needed to see my car. The problem is the rate of speed is so high and the angle of the chase cam is so tall, I couldn’t see in front me far enough (or react fast enough) to deal with traffic, even with its flashing lights, coming in my direction. I can’t imagine playing Dangerous Driving on a base model PlayStation 4, where 30 frames-per-second would provide even less feedback.
There’s also the general issue of Dangerous Driving’s formidable difficulty. In the Sedan class I dominated everything in my path and got gold or platinum ratings for every race. Naturally, as traffic started getting thicker and opponents more aggressive, I hit a precipitous drop off in the SUV and Coupe classes. I kept repeating the same races in Supercar before I had enough and quit. I’m not averse to hard games, but I never felt accomplishment when I passed a difficult trial in Dangerous Driving. Only relief. There were too many blind corners where, when I popped out on the other side, I was greeted with the tail end of normal vehicle. It stopped being fun and the absolute last thing I have time for in my life was constantly repeating a six minute race in which I have little control of the outcome.
It was difficult for me to get Dangerous Driving’s brand of racing. Courses, some of which have individual laps that exceed four minutes, aren’t easy to commit to memory. Instead of character and routine, aspects that defined tracks from arcade racers like Ridge Racer Type-4 and even sims like Gran Turismo, Dangerous Driving is bound to repeating curves and only creates variation from traffic patterns. It’s a style that’s closer to the 3DO’s original The Need for Speed or Criterion’s own work on 2011’s Hot Pursuit. Despite the different environmental backdrops, every course in Dangerous Driving feels the same.
With that in mind, most of Dangerous Driving’s visual pallet punches significantly above its weight. Courses run the gamut of seasons, including wind-swept deserts, coastal islands, wintery forests, and damp woodlands. The asphalt looks as beat up and gritty as it should, and the car models all look distinctive and well composed. There’s not much here that you will commit to memory, it’s absent of any particular idiosyncrasies, but in the moment it’s easy to take a look at Dangerous Driving and mistake it for a game with an exponentially larger budget.
Unfortunately cars don’t crash with much fanfare. Burnout created an expectation for sensational smash-ups and Dangerous Driving only delivers minor fender benders. Debris will chip off like confetti as you grind around corners, but the harshest cosmetic carnage is limited to one or two of the wheels falling off and some slight crumpling. Explosions have the severity of a grill lighter. Crashing, the thing Burnout made its own and invited players to take part in, has been reduced to another tired inconvenience.
It’s difficult to see the line between a bump and a crash. When I slam into walls sideways at 150mph nothing happens, but if I graze the side of a same-lane car, I wipe out. Any mishap that resulted in my car being horizontally oriented was paralyzing. There were also bizarre issues where I ran into a phantom sign, hit an invisible object in the middle of the street, and was Shunted by absolutely nothing. In a game that already feels overly punitive, all of this—either a bug of the Dangerous Driving just performing as intended—was demoralizing.
Three Fields Entertainment, in an interview with Game Informer , stated Dangerous Driving was developed in a period of eight months. Even if it was built off the back of Danger Zone, it feels like a game that was made in eight months. There’s a weird hitch and load in the middle of tunnels when transitioning between two courses. Sometimes this is annoying and sometimes, like in Pursuit challenges, the car you’re trying to Takedown will briefly disappear. The visual barrage of on-screen information, the lack of direction and instruction, and the “how am I supposed to avoid this” traffic issues don’t make for a great time. Sometimes Dangerous Driving exists in a vacuum where feedback and response are alien concepts.
Perceptible budget limitations are all over Dangerous Driving. The most divisive measure is its soundtrack, or lack thereof. Dangerous Driving, other than its title screen, has no onboard music. Instead, players are prompted to integrate their premium Spotify account and select playlists. On one hand, licensing two dozen songs would probably double Dangerous Driving’s $140,000 budget and listening to your own playlist is a legitimately wonderful idea. On the other hand, gosh, it sucks if you don’t have a paid Spotify account! I have alternately been aghast at this choice and thought it was brilliant, so it’s really up to your streaming music lifestyle to determine whether this is either a travesty or a bonus. Online competitive racing, which I had expected as a standard part of the package, also will not be available at launch, instead arriving sometime next month.
Even at $30, appreciating Dangerous Driving comes with a lot of qualifications. It’s amazing that seven people only needed a tiny budget and less than a year to create a game that used to consume a large studio and twice the time. It’s important that classic Burnout has some form modern representation. It’s a small tragedy that replication is its only ambition, that the technical performance is charitably described as a mess, and that the relief of a first place finish overwrites any sense of victory and accomplishment.
Dangerous Driving bets that spurned fans of Burnout still want more Burnout made by the only people they would trust to make more Burnout. It’s a skilled recreation, albeit one that forgets wild innovation and grinning novelty were as important to Burnout’s identity as racing and smashing up outrageous cars. Dangerous Driving, ironically, is defined by familiarity and comfort.
