Dangerous Driving burned out before it became Burnout

The following is a script of my 5-minute review of this game for Late Night Video Game Music on Radio KLFM.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3SgJArKGiPa963Vbx8HDx9

I hope you're prepped for a nostalgic throw-back, because Dangerous Driving takes its role as a Burnout clone as seriously as an indie team can.

Dangerous Driving a straight-forward racing game. You turn it on, pick a car, and race -- and as the developers say; the more dangerously you drive, the faster you go. There's an added bonus for all Burnout fans like myself, though: takedowns are alive and well. As you race through winding roads on cliff edges, snow peaks, and fields for days, you can smash your opponents into other vehicles or the environment and take first place -- earning some sweet speed boost while you're at it.

You may be wondering why I keep comparing Dangerous Driving to Burnout. Three Fields Entertainment is the indie studio behind Dangerous Driving. There are seven people total in the company, and it was formed by the original developers behind Burnout, from Criterion Games. When EA Games moved Criterion onto the Need for Speed franchise, three deves exited the company and formed Three Fields Entertainment with the intention of recreating Burnout on their own terms. They started small -- focusing on the Crash gameplay from Burnout 3, where you're encouraged to play to cause as much damage as financially possible, they developed three games that have honed their technical skills with physics and destruction, which led into Dangerous Driving.

With a limited budget, they've had to keep things within their means. There's no music in this game, save the main menu theme. Instead, they've opted to add complete Spotify integration -- if you so choose, you can hook up your playlist and control it all directly from within the game. If you were a fan of the Burnout soundtracks, feel free to play them underneath your destructive driving.

There's also no local co-op mode, but online multiplayer is still open and ready for you, if you and a mate wanted to shell out $40 to buy copies. I've jumped onto the servers today, and unfortunately, there's very, very frew people still playing the game -- at least on PS4.

With all this in mind… is it any good?

When I think about Dangerous Driving, I keep adding "for an indie game" to the end of my sentences. It's really fun "for an indie game." It's really well done "for an indie game." There are things that, the more I play it, the more I keep wishing they either had more time or more hands on deck to really pull this one together. I only discovered Dangerous Driving last week -- so I've definitely missed the hype train -- but regardless, I feel optimistic for something I don't have in my hands, if that makes sense. I bought this, I enjoy this, but I think I'm happy not that I paid for this game, but that I've supported the devs to make something a bit better?

It's the small things. There's no handbrake. It's accelerate or deccelarate. Every time I hit my square button expecting it to be a brake, it ends up being a way to look behind me, which isn't really something I found remotely necessary in this type of game. Drifting mechanics are in here, somewhere, but for the life of me I haven't worked them out, and I pride myself on being a fairly competant drifter in my racing games.

But. It is a great game to sit down and just switch off. Just load into some road rage and absolutely demolish as many cars as possible before time runs out or you get wrecked yourself. These are the kinds of games I needed more of, and I'm glad I found this.

Dangerous Driving released on the 9th of April, 2019. It's available physically and digitally on Playstation 4 and Xbox One, and also on Epic Games Store.