Burnout Revenge is the adrenalin packed sequel to last year's Burnout 3: Takedown, which was the sequel to Burnout 2 which was the sequel to, you guessed it, the first Burnout game that was released way back in 2002 during the days of Acclaim. Since switching to EA the series keeps going from strength to strength. And while you could easily criticise Burnout Revenge for falling into the EA habit of slow evolution rather than offering any mind blowing new features, the game's numerous graphical enhancements, excellent tracks and some great online support all contribute to create a truly slick experience.

For those new to the series, the Burnout games contain no weapons to rain destruction on your opponents, no story line to waste your time and no false pretences at all. The series is all about racing and drifting at insane speeds, driving down the wrong side of the road and then smashing the crap out of cars and causing as much vehicular devastation as possible. The three main gameplay modes on offer are the World Tour which is the single player side of the game, offline multiplayer for up to 6 people and also Xbox Live multiplayer.

The World Tour mode takes you through over 150 events that range from standard races, Burning Lap time based races, the return of last year's popular Road Rage where the aim is to destroy as many opponents as possible before your own car gets totalled, Eliminator races, Preview races where you get to sample some of the fastest cars in the game and Grand Prix where you battle for points over 3 races. Burnout fans will already be familiar with those events as they're pretty much what we saw in last year's game but Burnout Revenge contains a few new additions.

In previous Burnout games slamming into the traffic would end up in you crashing but now you can safely hit them from behind. This sends them flying forward at breackneck speed, with only a slight speed decrease as the penalty to your vehicle, and this new ability features as the main goal in the new Traffic Attack mode. You slam through the traffic smashing cars out of your way to earn time bonuses to keep going. It sounds pretty simple but as you cannot smash head on into oncoming or side on traffic some strategy is involved to get those gold medals.

There can be big gaps between the traffic areas which require you to drive as fast as possible, but then you hit an area with loads of cars and if your speed is too high you may end up missing most of the opportunities to smash them up. In these areas it pays to slow down a touch smashing left to right taking out as many cars as possible and this game mode was one of the hardest, I found, to constantly achieve gold medals in. This newest game mode is entertaining, but will probably be one of those things that was fun for Criterion to experiment with, but most likely probably won't find its way into future games.

The other new addition to the racing action is the 'Crashbreaker' mode from the Crash Events. The ability to perform 'Aftertouch takedowns' after you crash by holding down 'A' to activate the slow motion 'Aftertouch' and slam your wreck into opponents is still there, but many of the events let you setoff a Crashbreaker that sees your car explode taking out anything close by (this is the Revenge takedown where the game gets its subtitle). If you set the Crashbreaker off and no opponents are close by you lose your boost meter but if other cars are close you can take them out in a satisfying explosion of car pieces and flames. If a number of opponents are close together the ability to take out double, triple and even more at once is extremely cool. It fills up your boost meter nicely but doesn't give you any real advantage as the A.I cars are back on your tail almost straight away.

The Crash mode makes a welcome return and is one of the main reasons why a lot of gamers flock back to the series. The aim of the Crash mode is to slam your car into an intersection or part of a track taking out as much of the traffic as possible, a simple idea executed almost to perfection. The World Tour features quite a large number of Crash Zones, each with humorous names located at different spots around the globe and are even better this year thanks to the removal of the multipliers that made it possible to get Gold first time, every time. If you didn't play Burnout 3, last year's game introduced 2x and 4x multipliers to the crash zones and hitting these pretty much guaranteed silver or gold medals making these events extremely easy. Thankfully these are gone but the Crash mode isn't what you would call an overly difficult challenge. Quite often I achieved silver or gold on a lot of the Crash Zones and on the trickier ones it still only took 2-4 attempts and for a while the hardest part was getting used to the way that you now launch your car.

Instead of starting with a full boost now you have to hit 'A' to start a meter on the left of the screen, hit 'A' again just before it gets to the top and then 'A' a third time just before it gets back to the bottom to maximise your start speed. It's almost like a golf swing and if you mistime it you run the risk of either blowing your car up or fudging your take-off speed. For me, Crash mode is always enjoyable but it risks getting 'too clever' and veering away from its roots of simplicity which attracted us in the first place.

The damage that the cars take looks great with semi trailers losing their loads, traffic sliding out and exploding and one more new feature is the 'Target car' that if you manage to take out gives you a nice bonus to help you get your nice shiny medals. If you do enough damage to fill your boost meter you can set off a Crashbreaker and coupled with the Aftertouch allows you to explode your car again and steer the wreck into the other side of the road to try and create even more carnage. Except for the Traffic attack mode this will all sound very familiar to long term fans of the Burnout series and you may be thinking that there may not be enough new in the game to warrant another purchase just one year after the last game.

Where Burnout Revenge separates itself from Burnout 3: Takedown is the fantastic tracks (which were a little on the 'tight' side last year) and enhanced graphics. At first glance the graphics may not look that different but everything now sports a more realistic look with muted colours instead of the slightly cartoony primary coloured look of past games. The lighting effects have also been enhanced with some excellent touches, great texture art and the overall detail appears higher. The tracks are usually nice and wide with plenty of room for battling and loads of objects to slam your opponents into (or be slammed into by them!). The many multiple paths and some massive Midnight Club 3 style jumps really ramp up the action and make the racing in Burnout Revenge even more exciting than ever.

One of the valid criticisms levelled at the game again this year though is that you can slam around the track like a bumper car on steroids with not a great deal of skill being required to keep your car going at top speed. Just about the only thing that will take you out is hitting parts of the environment, traffic head on or being taken out by other racers. My 5 year old son can actually play the Road Rage events and get numerous takedowns without crashing, actually he could do that last year much to the amusement of the guy that works in my local EB store! It's not that the action has been 'dumbed down' but this plus the A.I that lets you catch up too easily doesn't really present much of a challenge to seasoned gamers and you will fly through most of the game without much difficulty.

The sound in the game is the same high quality that continues from past games. The soundtrack features numerous tracks from plenty of bands that I had never heard of so it got turned down within the first hour, it's not that the songs are particularly bad, but in a racing game I just prefer to hear the engine. The cars all sound nice and throaty and the crash sound effects are excellent. Burnout Revenge is definitely at its best played loud with the subwoofer rattling the floorboards and the neighbours wondering what the hell is going on.

Multiplayer, and more importantly, Xbox Live support makes a return to the Burnout series with plenty of game modes available. Offline some great fun can be had in the split screen racing and Crash Party modes but the real meat of Burnout Revenge's multiplayer side is found online. Last year the options and menus were a real letdown with some basic features we expected sadly missing. All the niggles from last year have been addressed and the online experience is slick without any major problems at all. The majority of races I took part in were all lag free, even against overseas opponents and all of the stats issues have been fixed as well. For some reason however, while the game features Xbox Live multiplayer support, the single player side of the game still isn't Live Aware. Why this continues to happen in Xbox Live compatible games is beyond me and to leave the online part of the game to return briefly to the single player side you have to log out. I'm sorry, but that just ticks me off.

Burnout Revenge addresses all the issues from Burnout 3: Takedown and greatly refines the overall experience. The tracks this year are a great improvement, the Crash Mode is a lot better off without the multipliers and the Crash Zones themselves are even more fun than ever before. A couple of omissions are the lack of any 'instant action' option in the main menu and if you wish to run a single Road Rage event you have to go into the World Tour menu and search through your completed events until you find one you would like to race again. Also the replays are gone! After jumping your car over a cliff, carefully slamming your car into a semi trailer and then causing millions of dollars of damage, you can't watch your handiwork. It would be been damn cool if you could save the replays like in a sports game and pause the action, rotate the camera around or watch it in slow motion.