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DANGER ZONE (PS4)
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Publisher: Three Fields Entertainment.
Developer: Three Fields Entertainment. Released: May 2017. Genre: Vehicle Combat. Other versions: XONE; PC. Posted 18th March 2021. By Tom Clare © 2021 |
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Three Fields Entertainment, a small development house consisting of ex-Criterion employees, spent much of the eighth generation working towards a spiritual revival of Burnout, something that would eventually be realised in the guise of Dangerous Driving. The Smashbreaker concept, exploding a projectile to cause a chain-reaction leading to further collisions and mounting destruction, was put to excellent and creative use in 2016’s Dangerous Golf. The next rung on the ladder for Three Fields was Danger Zone. In essence, it’s a game built entirely around Burnout’s much-loved Crash mode, set in a test lab environment that’s somewhat reminiscent of Portal. It’s good, anarchic fun, though a flawed scoring system means the carnage isn’t quite as fun as it might have been.
Danger Zone is really simple. The player’s job is to drive a car into traffic, triggering a pile-up. Cause enough cars to crash and you’ll earn a Smashbreaker, which can be triggered to cause additional damage, with some degree of control as to the direction of travel your wrecked vehicle then heads. The damage count, plus additional tokens and multipliers, will result in a medal ranging from Bronze up to Platinum.
Guide your wreck in the direction of oncoming traffic and watch your points - and the carnage - multiply
Whilst DZ doesn’t represent much of an evolution over its spiritual sixth-generation predecessors, a new coat of paint does make things look a little slicker. The testing sites may have been as much a cost-cutting measure as a concerted design choice, but its a pretty cool aesthetic that’s aided by effective lighting and clean environments. Smashing cars and building multipliers is satisfying and a lot of fun, though the limited control you have over your vehicle post initial impact can easily leave you beached. The physics don’t produce anything overtly anomalous, but the way crashes unfold can be unpredictable, which is frustrating when you’re trying to plot a route. Improving scores, climbing leaderboards and striving for better medals is highly addictive in the early stages, helping generate some impetus, even if the layouts will seem familiar to fans of the Burnout games.
The biggest problem comes not from the execution of the gameplay, but a design flaw: the over-importance of scoring tokens. Individually, they tend to add fairly small amounts to the overall score. However, collect all six in one run and you’ll be granted a mammoth bonus. So significant is this additional points haul that it has a completely transformative effect on how you go about the crashes. Getting amongst the better medals without achieving the so-called “Grand Slam” is out of the question. The trouble is, finding additional Smashbreaker icons and score tokens becomes almost the singular focus of the experience. They come to be far more important than crashes and combos, which largely take place as a by-product.
The biggest problem comes not from the execution of the gameplay, but a design flaw: the over-importance of scoring tokens. Individually, they tend to add fairly small amounts to the overall score. However, collect all six in one run and you’ll be granted a mammoth bonus. So significant is this additional points haul that it has a completely transformative effect on how you go about the crashes. Getting amongst the better medals without achieving the so-called “Grand Slam” is out of the question. The trouble is, finding additional Smashbreaker icons and score tokens becomes almost the singular focus of the experience. They come to be far more important than crashes and combos, which largely take place as a by-product.
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Jamming against ceilings, hitting an on-coming car at the wrong angle, not generating enough movement in the desired direction. These all add to the frustration because without hopping from token to token, there’s little prospect of success. Nevertheless, landing in the middle of an intersection and blowing up a swathe of buses is gleeful fun, as is rolling your smoking wreck over a line of parked cars. The levels are quite creative in the latter stages, with Danger Zone making smart use of vertically-layered roads. Traversing these can be a little awkward, as the Smashbreaker camera doesn’t allow the player to view what’s beneath their position. This means there’s a lot of guesswork involved and it can become very perilous if you factor in the instant-fail, out of bounds areas that surround a lot of the roads.
Including bonus levels, there are forty layouts to tackle. This sounds a lot, though in reality DZ can be finished in two or three sittings. Without any vehicle selection options or alternative game modes, the concept does start to stretch a little thin. That said, retrying the levels is still good fun and there’s often more to the traffic flows than is initially apparent.
Including bonus levels, there are forty layouts to tackle. This sounds a lot, though in reality DZ can be finished in two or three sittings. Without any vehicle selection options or alternative game modes, the concept does start to stretch a little thin. That said, retrying the levels is still good fun and there’s often more to the traffic flows than is initially apparent.
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Like Dangerous Golf before it, Danger Zone offers satisfying, destructive action that has a way of dragging you back for repeat runs, to improve your scores and nudge up the leaderboard. The game is also slightly less susceptible to crashes than its predecessor, although I did have a couple of instances where the game had to close because of errors. Where it loses out is in its lacks of creativity and versatility, with the one-more-go factor waning more quickly than Three Fields previous outing. In a nutshell, it’s just the ticket for fans of the Crash mode, though as evolutionary steps go, it’s a fairly conservative one.
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VERDICT
"Danger Zone offers satisfying, destructive action that has a way of dragging you back. As evolutionary steps go however, it’s a fairly conservative one." OVERALL: 6/10 |