Dangerous Driving Review

"Old School Smashing"

Campaign

April 14, 2019 at 4:11pm

Definitely inspired by Burnout, this title presents a bit of an aged look at racing and smashing into vehicles. At the start you get a single bit of music at the menu, with the option to include your Spotify premium for audio. I, like many others do not have that so my game was silent the entire time.

I suppose the licensing costs might have been an issue, but getting some sort of sound in there would have been appreciated. After that you get to select from a couple of levels, there's just the campaign and nothing else. It would have been nice to get a quickplay, or something extra. This leads into you needing to perform to unlock new races and that's not for everyone.

You do get a decent range of race types, but things are locked so you'll likely have to play a bit of everything to get a sense of progression going. It's very restrictive and a bit archaic in nature for the setup of play. There are multiple car classes as well from which these races are shuffled into. There's everything from the starter sedan, to the hypercar as just some examples. There's a fair selection of content here.

Gameplay

There's sort of an odd look to this one, it doesn't aim for realism and as what I would describe as a hyper-intense arcade look to it. The vehicles are well designed, and the environments are varied for the races. It just looks strange quite honestly, you should also expect traffic being a factor in the racing you're doing. The vehicles handle alright, somewhat of a slide to them when swiftly moving around. Something feels semi-off about it.

I find it's easy to crash yourself when ramming another car from behind, which is a bit silly as the goal is to largely smash into others. At least, that's what it felt like should have been the focus here. There's not really any complexity to the races and the opponents deploy a method of always being right on you. If you crash, you'll likely need to restart as it's hard to catch-up. Not impossible, just difficult and if you crash a second time it will be very hard to do so.

I don't like that feature, as there's no rewind and after an extended race it's just tiring to have to replay it. That makes this feel like a relic of a time long past. For examples of racing there's a typical type of race, one where the goal is to destroy vehicles and another where you're beating time limits. You also unlock different vehicle types within each specific circuit area.

The Conclusion

Dangerous Driving is just alright, it feels aged and it really wasn't anything too exciting to play. It's restrictive in design and there isn't a whole lot to it. I can also see some people getting hung up on levels and not being able to access anything else. It really should have had a quickplay option, or something else to add extra value. Use the existing content, just present it in another way aside from the campaign structured setup for additional replay.

I wasn't too thrilled by the driving setup and the relentless AI that were always just on you. The lack of music was unsettling and made this too calming of a time. I didn't find there to be any innovation with the racing options or just what the game presented. It ran fine and looked alright for its distinct visual style. I just wasn't too blown away by what was presented here.

Read our Trials Rising Review
View our Game Hubs

Dangerous Driving Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by Tara Bruno PR

Rating Overall: 5.2