Staff – April 16, 2019 at 9:54 AM
While the environments in Dangerous Driving are quite pretty, your vital role as a player is to litter them with hideous wrecks. This is what that looks like: Hurtling through the sun-kissed desert, you shunt flaming sedans across the dunes. Weaving beneath fallen redwoods, overwhelmed and going too fast, you clip an oncoming semi and collapse your front end against a guard rail.
A lot of driving games have you traversing stunning locales, but few marry their picturesque visuals to such ebulliently madcap gameplay like Dangerous Driving does. It’s surreal satisfaction to gaze out over a snowy mountain vista as your car is launched twenty feet in the air and its wheels fly off its axles.
“We love the thrill of driving at insane speeds and leaving a trail of destruction in our wake,” says Phil Maguire, the game’s technical director. This affection for arcade racing shows, right down to the lovingly rendered way cars smoke, soar, and tumble through the environment.
Dangerous Driving represents the culmination of all the mayhemic work Maguire and his team have made since forming Three Fields Entertainment in 2014. “Dangerous Golf honed our destruction and real-time physics skills,” Maguire explains. “Danger Zone set us up with insane car crashes in an indoor test zone. Danger Zone 2 gave us the tech to take all this crashing action outdoors into real-life junctions with more vehicles and more events.”
They’ve now applied all that expertise toward the best destruction-happy racer they could make. Three Fields is a small indie studio composed of seven people who were integral in the production of the famous Burnout series. Even though they worked with limited resources, Three Fields have finally birthed a worthy heir to the Burnout mantle in Dangerous Driving, updating the genre they helped create with a number of fresh touches.
One of the game’s most impactful innovations is the persistent wreck feature. When you take down an opponent in Dangerous Driving, their totaled hunk of junk stays wherever it lands, creating an automotive graveyard for you and the rest of the pack to navigate on subsequent laps. The ends of races can get pretty hairy, as you need to dodge all the obstacles you successfully avoided on lap one plus the pair of coupes and the SUV you hip-checked into an inoperable state a few minutes ago.
The persistent wrecks add a nerve-fraying degree of randomness to every run. You can study the twists and turns of the game’s various tracks, but when you come over the crest of a hill only to be greeted by the steel husk of a downed enemy, panic and reflexes take over.
This is Dangerous Driving’s elemental appeal, the ways it forces the player to improvise with little to no warning. The tracks aren’t speedways so much as dynamic obstacle courses, and getting through them with only a few scrapes feels like a triumph.
Special attention has been paid to the different types of vehicles players can use to dish out punishment while avoiding it themselves. “We have tailor-made our cars for each mode,” Maguire says. “In this genre, vehicles can end up being the same — just a model swap with very similar stats. In Dangerous Driving, we wanted to make car choice more meaningful.”
Advanced Vehicles, for instance, absorb damage more easily, while Prototype Vehicles are fast and nimble but also a lot more fragile. You can also tune your car to make it earn and burn boosts more quickly. You’ll likely cycle between models and their tuned/untuned versions depending on the way you prefer to drive or which mode you’re playing.
Speaking of modes, Dangerous Driving has nine of them, all of which will be familiar to fans of arcade racing. Pursuit casts the player as a maniac cop trying to junk the bad guys’ getaway vehicle. Survival is about beating the clock without a single crash.
Road Rage, which sees the player chaining together as many takedowns as possible within a set time limit, is an old fan favorite from the Burnout days, and Maguire says it’s tougher than ever before. “We wanted to introduce new ways to play, so in later events we upped the challenge level,” Maguire explains. “How many Takedowns can you score when Shunts are disabled, or when only Traffic Takedowns count?” He tells us he’s eager to see what the Traffic Takedowns leaderboard looks in the weeks following Dangerous Driving’s launch, because it’s a tricky skill to master. The office record at Three Fields is reportedly ten.
There’s an impressive amount of variety in Dangerous Driving, especially considering the size of the development team that made it, but what comes through clearly in each choice Three Fields has made is an abiding fondness for the intense, catastrophically fun arcade racers that have preceded it. Dangerous Driving functions as a best-of compilation for the genre, delivering customary delights — the joy of just barely maintaining control while doing 140 MPH in the wrong lane, the sour thrill of an opponent disposing of you like a crumpled-up fast food wrapper — in a thoroughly modern package.
For instance, you can import your Spotify Premium playlists into the game. “We’ve long believed that the music people drive to is intensely personal,” Maguire says. “So we really wanted to integrate Spotify and give people endless choice.”
In short, Dangerous Driving provides what you would expect, enhanced by what you didn’t yet know you wanted.
The game releases on PC on April 9th. You can order it right now on the Epic Store. In the first month after launch, there will continue to be a multiplayer-enabling DLC release that allows you to take your racing and gleeful traffic obliteration online with friends, who will only sort of appreciate you chucking them into a ravine on the last lap.
