Danger Zone Review – PC

I’m a huge fan of the Burnout series (I still play the iPad Burnout Crash! game), so when I heard that several folks from Criterion had splintered off, I was eager to see what they would come up with. Interestingly enough the first game out their door was Dangerous Golf, which somehow fused the destructive gameplay of the Burnout franchise with an indoor mini golf putting challenge. While fun enough in its own way it certainly wasn’t the same as crashing cars.

Now, exactly one year later, Three Fields Entertainment is back with Danger Zone, a game that surgically removes the crash-tastic intersection, chain-collision, crash for cash concept from Burnout and presents it as its own style of puzzles and challenges set in a futuristic crash test facility. On the surface the game mirrors the iPad game more than any other Burnout game. The simplistic approach of “here is a car, now drive it into this intersection and do as much damage as possible” caters to our instinctual craving for creating chaos and hearing tires screech, engines explode, and smoking car shells slamming into each other, but offers little else.

And therein lies my problem with Danger Zone. It’s boring. You have 20 crash test scenarios that all play out in this same sterile testing lab facility where cars materialize through shimmering portals onto a suspended road hovering over a laser grid that will de-res your car if you fall into it. Crashing is easy but earning the requisite points for bronze, silver, or gold medals will take a few attempts.   It’s always disheartening to check the leaderboards and find the guy that is first in the world only took four tries to earn his billion points on a certain level. I would really love a feature that recorded replays so we could see how these high scores were earned; something like the Trials series does.

Even so, it only takes a bit of observation and planning on the most efficient path to take to maximize car collisions and still pass through all the various smashbreak and cash icons. Then it’s just about the skill and luck (mostly luck) to make it happen. Press the gas and pick your moment of first impact then it’s all about the slow-motion crash and after touch steering as your simultaneous tweak your camera and your car direction to steer into other cars and those icons.

As each level starts you are given clear objectives on how much damage you need to do to earn the medals as well as how many collisions to trigger your first smashbreaker. Any additional smashbreakers must be earned by collecting the icons from the roads and intersections. Obviously, the longer you can keep the explosions and chain reactions going the higher the score. Timing is important as cars come and go on their own schedule and if you wait too long to do something all the cars can actually exit the level leaving you nothing to smash.

The game looks great from a technical standpoint but aesthetically speaking is boring and uninspired. Cars are limited to a few makes and models and you have the occasional truck and school bus thrown in. Level design is totally sterile, and while the rotating emergency lights add a cool chaotic ambience to the experience, I really missed the outdoor themes from the Burnout games. Even the top-down Burnout Crash! game offered more diversity. I must confess the explosions and fireballs are truly exciting and virtually photo realistic.

Danger Zone has so much missed opportunity. There is no multiplayer party mode, so if you have a group of people over you are going to have to pass the controller around under one player’s profile. And where are all the cool challenges? Make me hit 20 school buses or pick one target car and challenge me to hit it before it escapes the grid. I’m sure I am totally spoiled by the tidal waves, tornadoes, and UFO destruction from Burnout Crash! but still; at least try to make the game a bit fun and goofy. Randomized chaos is fun for only so long, and my enjoyment wore thin about halfway through the game’s 20 levels making the final few hours of Danger Zone more chore than challenging. And for a game that is all about try and repeat, some faster load times would be appreciated.   For as simple and lifeless as these levels are it should all fit into RAM and offer instant restart.

Hopefully Danger Zone was testing the waters for perhaps a more robust game down the road. Even at $13 I can only recommend this to the most diehard of car crash fans. With only one car to drive and a half dozen other car models to crash into and only 20 scenarios you may complete the game once but there is little here to keep you coming back for more.   It might be worth checking out on sale, but sadly I’d have to recommend skipping Danger Zone. Maybe try Dangerous Golf instead.

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Author: Mark Smith
I've been an avid gamer since I stumbled upon ZORK running in my local Radio Shack in 1980. Ten years later I was working for Sierra Online. Since then I've owned nearly every game system and most of the games to go with them. Not sure if 40+ years of gaming qualifies me to write reviews, but I do it anyway.

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