[Euan]

Two weeks after the release of the PSP in European shores one of the best games thus far arrived. Ignoring the 30-mile speed limit, rip-roaring past other motorists and crashing into anything that comes into it’s path, Burnout Legends arrived.

The EA team, noticing an opportunity to make a buck or two out of their popular racing franchise created a ‘best of’ Burnout, with top tracks and modes from the first three installments of the series making a welcome return on one disk.

Now I’m not a racing fan, I must admit that before I even go onto the games graphics, musical scores et all. Gran Turismo bores me, the free-roaming on Need for Speed frustrates me, Juiced is too slow, but, despite my lack of interest in the genre, the Burnout series has always appealed to me simply because of it’s nature.

The gameplay is pretty simple. Drive fast, take down your opponents and in story mode, travel round the world looking for various races.

There’s lots of modes to Burnout. First of all, making a comeback from Burnout 2 is ‘Pursuit mode’ - you are the cop and the car marked ‘target’ in front of you must be battered and bashed into until the health bar at the top of the screen is no more.

Second of all is my particular favourite, Road Rage. A takedown is exactly what it says on the tin - you bash your opponent and the car crashes into mid-air. There are plenty of ways to do it - you can bump into a car so it heads straight into the path of one of the cars on the road, smash it against a wall or even ‘psyche’ is out with your nearby presence.

Third is the biggest mode, Crash mode. Not one of my particular favourites, but even so it can be fun. You are the car - a junction is ahead of you. Drive as fast as you can, crash into a car in the middle of the road, and watch in glee as carnage happens on the roads. You earn money depending on the amount and size of vehicles (with bigger vehicles, for example trucks earning you more cash). There was me wondering why I had a twenty-minute delay waiting in traffic to get to school.

For your ‘average joe’ racing fan, the modes they will be most familiar with are face off, race and burning lap. Both are pretty similar, a race involves four cars and you race round three laps praying to finish top of the list, whereas Face Off is only two cars - and if you win, you get the other persons car. Burning lap is even less, it’s you on your own attempting to break a course record. Neat.

There’s plenty of modes, but what actually makes Burnout the game it is? Speed is the key, and that’s exactly what Burnout Legends delivers on the PSP. As soon as you open up the game, you realise this is a bit special graphically (in terms of a ‘launch title’ of sorts, I do realise that it will be bettered in a few years time) and keeps the speed-junkies smiling-- and me...

There has been cutbacks from the games graphics, however. The now famous ‘blurring’, which was designed to let the gamer appreciate the speed - and believe you me, it worked - had to be sacrificed in order to keep this game as speedy as possible.

Musically, this game has gone downhill a little. No longer are our ears filled with Franz Ferdinands’ excellent ‘this fire’, although it sticks to the same genre, it’s generally not as good. There are two or three tunes which will capture your attention, but generally the bands try to make as much noise as possible. It’s still good though and serves it’s purpose - it’s fast, it’s loud and the tunes certainly aren’t in the ‘switch off the volume’ bracket.

If you love all the things that go before it, the lifespan can be as long as you like. To gain gold medals (Burnout has the traditional three-medal set-up, Gold, Silver, Bronze, depending on how well you do on the modes), hey, you’ll be racing for quite a long time. There are 175 modes, various ‘takedown’ tasks, trophies, lots of cars to collect and pretty much you’ll be a busy man/woman (we’re not sexist here at TDS) for the next few months if you are planning to one-hundred percent complete this game.

This game is not perfect though, as I have made it to be during this review. Occasionally there are errors which you come across - my game crashed once or twice when I had been taken down, failing to move from an image of my car. The camera angles in ‘crash mode’ can be a little suspect, you can be staring at a truck for twenty seconds or so. Not an entertaining sight.

Then there’s the infamous ‘track change’ error. When you change tracks, sometimes there is a one-second or so delay, which ultimately could crash you. Thankfully it hasn’t directly affected me yet, so hey I don’t really care - but be warned.

The final ‘error’, if you can call it that, is the load times. They’re not terrible, terrible, but they’re not too good either especially if your restarting games regularly attempting to break a course record.

A good game, with five modes of cars, hundreds of races to interest you, and most importantly, it’s a fun game. Extremely fun. If your a fan of racing games, or even if you aren’t, Burnout is a good addition to your PSP collection.

Graphics 9/10 - Nice, very nice, but are these great graphics spoiling other areas of the game such as the 'track change' slowdown?

Gameplay 10/10 - Hey, you can't fault the gameplay, it intertwines racing fans and non-racing fans in one large love-fest...

Music 7/10 - It's not bad, but hey, we expect better from Burnout.

Lifespan 8/10 - Yeah, there's lots of modes - but do you really have the urge to play through all of them?

Overall: 8/10 - A good addition to the PSP line-up, and essential if you have the cash...

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Tell me what you think? Give as much feedback as possible; good or bad? Any constructive critisism?