…or Burnout Revenge for the Xbox 360 in review.

I got hooked on the Burnout series with the third incarnation for the original Xbox, namely Burnout Takedown. It’s a killer game and the multiplayer part is great. (With only a little load time between each race if you use the Retry option to play the same track.) I never played much Burnout Revenge on the orignal Xbox, the graphics was too confusing for the low resolution especially in the multiplayer part and I really wanted to wait for the Xbox 360 version.

I got the 360 version a short while after the release and have played through most of the World Tour part by now. It sports addicting and fun gameplay but the load times is unfortunately taking away some of the fun.

In the single player part of the game it is somewhat bearable, since you’re just one person waiting and in theory you can do other stuff while waiting. The waiting is usually in the range of 30-40 seconds or at least that’s what it feels like. I can watch a bunch of commercials before the game has loaded. The load time is no different if you start a new game or restarts a track. This is very annoying when you are trying to beat the time in a Burning Lap event, since if you crash you have no chance at beating the clock, so you might as well restart and wait once again.

This is not acceptable, but all in all ok, the graphics are nice and stuff like that, but consider how much time you waste waiting on your console just loading stuff. It annoys me. At this time I have played around 15 hours of Burnout Revenge. How much time was spent waiting on the darn this loading? I seriously don’t want to know.

What’s even worse is during the multiplayer part and to some extend the single player part (if you achieve a higher rating) and this is the part I really hate! You are forced to return to the menu for the darn game to save in single player and for no apparent reason in a multiplayer game! This fucking blows! In single player there is the reason for saving the game, but in multiplayer there is no reason what-so-ever. There is absolute no excuse, this is purely bad UI design by the developer!

Anway, it easily takes 5-10 seconds to load the menu and save the game. Then you can start the process of selection your game type, choose vehicles, etc. and wait for the game to load once again. This quickly consumes two minutes between each game – compare this to the actual amount of time you play a track before you have to return to the menu. The ratio is fucked up – and it removes the fun in multiplayer gaming. For this sole reason I’ve only play around three multiplayer sessions. We just can’t the loading times.

I don’t understand why Criterion didn’t opt to use the harddrive in the 360. It must be able to speed up the load time significantly. I don’t accept the reason that the harddrive is not present in all console. As far as I know other games can do this, so why can’t Burnout Revenge. If Criterion doesn’t do at lot better with the next game in the Burnout series, they have certainly lost a supporter. The happy consumer in me they already lost…