Burnout 2: Point of Impact

aka: Burnout 2: Point of Impact - Developer's Cut
Moby ID: 8895
PlayStation 2 Specs
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Description official descriptions

Racing a car is one thing, but racing into traffic at high speeds, where you are rewarded for the style of your crash, is another. This is the idea behind Burnout 2, which brings new modes and higher speeds compared to the original title. As usual, the aim is to speed around real-life roadways, through the traffic ahead, while avoiding collisions.

Burnout is a street racing game focused around speed and crashing. Unlike many games that focus on closed course driving, you get to drive through cities with real traffic and city infrastructure. Designers have built city districts and surrounding areas and implemented the racecourses throughout the streets. As a result, many times certain parts of race-courses interlace with other parts of other races. As well, instead of encouraging strategic driving and safe driving, Burnout strongly encourages offensive driving. Driving on the wrong side of the road, barely missing passing traffic, drifting, and jumps all add to your boost "burnout" meter. Speed boosts and jumps aid your attempt to drive past buses, trucks, and anything else that gets in the way. The more offensive and dangerous your driving is, the more boost you get!

Burnout 2 contains a full campaign and custom car campaign. While you can unlock regular cars and tracks, later in the campaign you unlock more raceways like reverse tracks and one-way sprints. You can unlock over 20 cars like a Nascar, a 1920s gangster car, a Japanese muscle, and many customized vehicles with custom paint jobs and upgraded stats.

Along with the same sense of speed and highly detailed crash animations as before, Point of Impact includes new modes of play. Pursuit mode has you playing the cop as you chase down the speeding motorists, and to win you must crash them out of the race. Or you can reverse that with a friend. You can flee from a friend while he attempts to chase you. Crash mode, as the name suggests, forces you to glide into crowded intersections to get the most cars involved in a pile-up as possible. The bigger the crash, the better. Up to 4 players can compete for the best score.

Training and 2 player racing modes are also included.

Spellings

  • 横冲直撞2 - Chinese spelling (simplified)

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Credits (PlayStation 2 version)

69 People (47 developers, 22 thanks) · View all

Head of Criterion Games
Creative Managers
Concept Designer
Lead Artist
Lead Programmer
Course Design and Modelling
Vehicle Design and Modelling Lead
Vehicle Design and Modelling
Additional Art
Programming
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 88% (based on 55 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 53 ratings with 2 reviews)

Intense, Rewarding and Fast Gameplay.

The Good
With tons of unlockables, mostly involving newer and faster cars, this game packs quite a long play time. I've had it for nearly five months now and I am just nearing the end. The gameplay works extremely well, wherein it rewards you for driving recklessly, giving you boosts for drifting around corners, going dangerously close to cars and driving against oncoming traffic. Furthermore, when using the boosts, if you fully empty your boost meter, you gain half and sometimes all the boost energy back. Conclusion, you'll be one reckless piece of work when driving in this game or you're going to lose. As mentioned before there's a wealth of cars to be unlocked, and they're balanced quite nicely. Sure you'll be going fast as hell on some of the later cars, but the less speedy cars have the benefit of making most turns better. But in the end, when you get good enough at drifting, steering won't be a problem even when using the fastest car available. There're enough modes to race in, and there's also a Crash mode where your objective is to do as much damage as possible when crashing into a road intersection or highway.

The Bad
The Gamecube version suffers slight frame-rate problems when playing in multiplayer. Also, four-player multiplayer would've been neat, but I can't see the Gamecube handling the framerate then, either. There are a couple of minor issues, also, with placement after a crash in a race. In a very few cases it puts me in a very awkward spot where you're either stuck between two civilian cars and crash immediately or you start off facing a wall and it takes a while to get your direction and drive off to a slow start. Personally, I'd like to see some minor damage to the car when you don't crash hard enough to stop the car, cause it's quite awkward when you collide with a car and just nudge off it without a scratch.

The Bottom Line
Despite a couple of minor issues and personal preferences, Burnout 2 is a stellar game with fast and furious (Ugh, it took a lot of psychological strength to say those two words in the same sentance) gameplay and a lot of playtime if you like unlocking things.

GameCube · by BigJKO (64) · 2003

A fantastic intense racing game bogged down by terribly cheap AI tricks.

The Good
Combining the best from Need For Speed and Destruction Derby, Burnout 2: Point of Impact really pleased me, especially since it goes for about twenty bucks now. It's an arcade racing game with heavy emphasis on insane crashing -- there's even a racing mode specifically made for crashing and getting high scores based on the amount of money you caused those involved! Races are very, very intense, very fast, and included are about thirty different courses and a plethora of cars to choose from.

Rather than placing you along a closed course like those other silly racing games, Burnout 2 places you in the middle of a busy freeway, residential streets, one-way tunnels -- in the wrong direction -- any kind of situation that puts innocent drivers at risk of being the next victim in some crazy race to the finish line. You gain "boost" points by pulling off stunts, such as catching air, nearly-hitting traffic, lengthy drifts, or just seeing how long you last driving in the oncoming lane. It provides you with a boost of speed that lasts for several seconds, or, well, until you blow it and cover the road with your car's (and all other cars' involved) guts. It's a hell of a better incentive than Kudos Points.

The Bad
Unfortunately, while the game is great fun, it's almost completely ruined by the cheap AI in single player. They act like they're attached to your car by some invisible rubber band. If you're doing well, they're doing well. If you do poorly, they do poorly. Generally, if you're WAY out there in first place, it doesn't really matter how far you've gone, how good you're doing, the computer is always right behind you. And the same goes for last place. You can sit there in the starting area for thirty seconds and let the computer get a headstart and be able to catch up within two laps. And because of this crap, the only lap that really means anything to the game is the very last lap. It doesn't matter how well you've done the previous four laps -- it's that last lap that makes the difference. So it's especially frustrating when you're having the best race of your career, only to slip up inches behind the finish line and end up in last place, where, judging by the skills of the computer AI earlier in the race, you should have lapped them all by now! I can understand, and heck, even appreciate why they did this. It's to keep the race intense. To keep all the cars right next to each other increases the risk of a multi-car pileup. But when your objective is to race, to win, not just to crash, it's frustrating.

Also included is a "pursuit" mode (which would have been really awesome if you could have played as the escapee rather than the cop, but oh well) which gets more and more frustrating the farther into it you play. The object of this game is to "ram" the opponent about ten times before he reaches the finish line, but unfortunately for you, his car doesn't obey the same physics laws that yours does. In almost all situations, he cannot crash. He will just bump other cars out of his way (and right into yours usually), sometimes he will pull off impossible turns so that he stays in front of you and keeps the game "interesting". Funny thing: if he somehow gets behind you, you instantly crash.

I think the crash detection could be a little more sensitive in places, and less sensitive in others. A lot of times you can hit walls, cars, other things almost dead-on and just "slide" off like your car is covered in grease. Other times you'll barely -- or not even! -- nick an object and the camera will go into crash-cam and your car will slow to a stop...but no crash actually occurred.

And finally, another horrible design decision is that, in order to unlock the next car/course/whatever, you have to score a gold medal in a series of races in a row. So if you spend an hour getting gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold...and then get silver (because you made a mistake on that last lap) then the entire effort was for nothing. Oh, it was fun, sure, but you didn't get to unlock anything.

The Bottom Line
Despite the terrible "rubber-band" AI, this is one of the funnest racing games I've played. Multiplayer is a blast, even though the Gamecube version occasionally suffers from minor (almost not noticeable) framerate issues.

Tons of cars, game modes, and courses to unlock, this game just keeps bringing me back in for another go.

GameCube · by kbmb (415) · 2004

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Burnout 2: Point of Impact appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Kartanym.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Indra was here, Victor Vance, FatherJack.

Game added April 14, 2003. Last modified December 28, 2023.