There's nothing quite like the sensation of causing almost cartoonish levels of destruction to other vehicles in a city devoid of pedestrians, especially when you can take those vehicular shenanigans on the go! EA Games is working on bringing its top-down physics-puzzler Burnout CRASH! to iOS devices.

The gameplay will remain the same as it's PSN and XBLA counterparts, asking to the player to try to take out all cars while doing it in the most explosive manner possible to rack up as many points as they can. They have also included the Autolog social network, a way for players to track and compare there scores with friends. Autolog will also give players the opportunity to issue direct challenges to other friends or? rivals.

No word yet on a verified release date, but EA Games is looking to push Burnout CRASH! iOS for a holiday release. What better way to celebrate the holidays then w??ith the sounds of shattering glass and gasoline-fueled e??xplosions!

The post Burnout CRASH! making its way to iOS, wit?h screenshots appeared first on Destructoid.

The Burnout franchise is best known for its insane speeds and awesome crashes, so when a downloadable title that would center on its Crash mode was announced a while back, it made enough people curious as to what it would be. When Burnout Crash! was unveiled to essentially be a top-down physics puzzle game with Kinect support, a lot of that initial  interest ??deflated a bit, to say the least.

However, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of ridiculousness, addictiveness, and sheer fun Criterion?? was able to fit into their new game.

Burnout Crash! (Xbox Live Arcade [reviewed], PlayStation Network)
Developer: Criterion Games
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Released: September 20, 2011 (PSN) / September 21, 2011 (XBLA)
MSRP: $9.99 (PSN) / 800 Microsoft Points (XBLA)

To enjoy Burnout Crash!, it's best if you forget everything you know about the franchise except for Crashbreakers. It looks nothing like Burnout Paradise, plays nothing like any other game in the series, and besides a few familiar streets and the Crashbreaker n?ame, it could've been titled anything and would've been the exact same game.

Half of the effort here is accepting Burnout Crash! for the puzzle game it is, and thankfully, the other half involves just having fun. With your vehicle of choice, you start barreling down a path tow?ards an intersection where cars periodically appear from all directions. The goal is simple: make all cars crash without letting any of them escape, and try to score as many points as possible by destroying everything you can in the most effective way.

After hitting the first car in a level, you activate your continuously regenerating Crashbreaker to try and catch other cars in your explosion, or by exploding a wreck directly into them for a skillshot. Then you do the same thing on the opposite side of the road, hopefully resulting in a bunch of cars (and preferably, buses) piled up at intersections, which makes every approaching vehicle crash? somewhere without requiring you to manually wreck them yourself.

In the meantime, you can hunt for sports cars and gold cars for extra points, Crashbreak yourself into to buildings to destroy them whenever crashes elsewhere in the field help you fill up the Crashbreaker bar, or try to create a tangle of c??ars that you can later set on fire to make all wrecks explode in a sequent??ial orgy of flames that would emasculate even the likes of Michael Bay.

So far this could've described the Crash Mode from Burnout 3 for the most part, but Burnout Crash! adds some ridiculous stuff to revel in its arcade? destination. Crash enough cars in the game's standard Road Trip mode, and different Features wil?l take place. These include a sinkhole that eats traffic for points, a truck that will fire a "traffic-seeking missile" when exploded, an ice cream truck that freezes all traffic solid, a magnet modifier that attracts all traffic to your car so you can wreak havoc, and a thunderstorm that adds bonus lightning strikes to any car you explode.

You'll go through a few of these predetermined events, some of which will yield negative effects like "Bad Cops" who will try to bust you, until you finally re??ach the Super Feature -- a level-ending disaster that will clear up anything you left standing, provided ??you didn't let too many cars escape. Such catastrophies include an asteroid strike, a tidal wave with a ship riding it that gets eaten by a shark with a propeller, and a plane crash.

These Features and Super Features can be amazingly fun at first, although they do lose some of their novelty after you've seen them announced with a slightly annoying voice-over for the 50th time. Still, they add to all the craziness, and if you don't have a smile on your face during the first 15 minutes you're playing Burnout Crash!, either something is wrong with you or you are just terrible ??at physics puzzle games.

Someone? at Criterion or EA's marketing division must really love the '80s as well, because hits from that period pop up all over the game. Hit the gold car, and you'll hear Spandau Ballet's "Gold!," whereas the thunderstorm Feature makes your surround set blast "It's Raining Men" to all you??r friends, regardless of their sexual preference. It doesn't make that much sense in a game, but somehow it works. I'll say this, though, you'll probably enjoy it more if you are a child of the '80s or '90s.

Play Burnout Crash! for a few hours, however, and you might feel some frustratio?n nibbling away at the fun here and there.

Part of this frustration comes from the game's primary mode: Road Trip. This is the regular crash mode with all the bells and whistles, but it's all too easy to lose by letting five cars slip through your explodin??g fi??ngers of doom. If you carefully piled up a mess of wrecks at key intersections, they might explode after too much damage, thus clearing the path for future traffic to get away unscathed. This tends to come exactly at the moments when you are feeling safe, Crashbreaking your way through buildings and bonus vehicles hidden away in the level.

Then again, this is something that, while frustrating, is a matter of skill, patience, and retries. Less skill-oriented is Rush Hour mode, where you have to pile up as many cars as possible to go boom in a massive explosion when a 90-second timer hits zero. In this mode, a pizza truck can be destroyed for a "Pizza of Fortune" -- a pizza wheel with positive and negative bonuses -- which can give you a coveted 3x multiplier to score ridiculously big, or something that will ruin your run if you're not careful. Because Burnout Crash! is a game all about scoring, the randomness of the Pizza of Fortune is a bit odd. To compete with your friends, you basically have to become good at a level and be lucky enough to get the right bonuses.

The game's Pile Up?? mode feels a bit like a throwaway inclusion. While fun, this mode asks you to let no car escape lest an Inferno multiplier drop to zero and -- like the Rush Hour mode -- it wants you to work out your crashes for the end of the level, indicated by a number of total crashes. Hit this number, and you'll have a few seconds to set something on fire during an "Inferno" section. It doesn't matter what; just set something on fire, anything at all. In practice, you can end up with a nice pile of wrecks, have them explode by accident just before the Inferno section hits, and watch as your Crashbreaker bar regenerates just too slowly to hit an??ything before the time is up.

While these frustrations exist, they are secondary to the fun you can have with Burnout Crash! if you a?re willing to overlook them. As the game comes with EA's Autolog for things like score comparisons and sending challenges to your friends, you're likely going to play the three modes across 18?? levels over and over anyway. Replaying a few minutes here and there just because you were unlucky is not going to be a dealbreaker.

It is, however, really odd that the game marks every in-game retry as an attempt. Score hunters will retry at the slightest mistake within the first 10 seconds, but the game makes you look as if you retried an ent??ire crash mode dozens of times to get a paltr??y score. You can also easily lose track of where your car flew off to, especially after you unlock and use some of the lighter cars.

Finally there's the Kinect functionality, which is only useful for the local multiplayer mode or to make a fool of yourself while your child looks at you and judges you. You don't need it, and you're not going to want to use it unless you desperately need something other than Dance Central to entertain those friends who question the soundness of your peripheral-purch?asing behavior. (But it's not going to convi??nce them.)

If you can embrace Burnout Crash!'s design with open arms and wave the few annoyances away in the scope of a thousand retries, submit to the Autolog addiction with a bunch of friends, and devote yourself to hours upon hours of fighting for that high score, I can't recommend it enough. Still, Burnout Crash! can be entirely different things to different types of players. For those who are in it for the high scores and who have "Start, down, A, A" motions for restarting a race hardwired in their brain, it is pure arcade bliss. Those who prefer racing to physics-based puzzling with crashing cars might feel disappointed or let down by the Burnout name, but that's what demos are for.

The post Review: Burnout Crash! appeared first on Destructoid.

Okay, now Burnout Crash! is starting to look more appealing. Spaceships? I had no idea. This is a good time, seeing as how the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade title was dated today. It's hitting PSN and XBLA on Tues?day, September 20 for $10, apparently.

Doesn't the latter usually get releases on Wednesday? Huh. At that price, I'll have to bite. A few new screenshots -- one of which teases some of the powers you can use in Crash! -- are in the gallery.

The post $10 gets you Burnout Crash! on PSN or? XBLA in September appeared first on Destructoid.

Here is a fresh look at Burnout Crash!, direct from the legion-esque FTP ?servers that are gamescom. I feel sorry for the virtual citizens of the game's town. Poor people never stood a chance.

As much as I don't like being that guy, I'm going to say it: I still wish this standalone game was presented in the traditional Burnout style, rather than from an overhead perspective. The transition loses some of the excitement ga??ined from being up close to the mayhem.

Granted, this game will have Autolog functionality, so I'll likely buy it and love it anyw??ay. ?Drat.

The post Burnout ?Cr??ash! trailer shows a meteor, tornado, and more appeared first on Destructoid.

Burnout Crash was originally planned to release in the tail-end of this year, but has suddenly shot way ahead of its proposed ??launch window in order to come out next month. EA's motion-controlled, top-down, jumping-to-explode game will be yours to enjoy in August. 

Oh, you're supposed to write it as Burnout CRASH! apparently. 

I'm not doing that.

Burnout Crash Is Coming In August 2011! [EA.com]

The post Burnout Crash launches ne?xt month (jump to explode, etc.) appeared first on Destructoid.

The first trailer for Burnout Crash! didn'??t show us much ??of anything, so thanks to MotoGamesTV, here's your first look.

The footage looks to be taken from an Xbox 360 build of the game which is being played with Kinect. That much ?is obvious as you can see the on-screen indicators for things like steering with your hands and, uh... jum?ping to explode. Huh.

Burnout Crash! is being released for both Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network (with an iPad release likely, but you didn't hear it from me!), so expect a more traditional control scheme, as well. And thank goodness -- I do not want to jump to explode. Ever.

We'll have a hands-on preview and impressions of the game shortly, so sit tigh?t for more details. 

The post Jump to explode: See Burnout Crash! in action appeared first on Destructoid.

[Update: Added a trailer for the game which features no gameplay and answers absolutely no questions. The game's ESRB rating offered up more info a few months back. Did you? know giant lobst??ers will be in this game? Sold!]

Electronic Arts has announced Burnout Crash! today a??t its summer showcase event, and it's not entirely what you'd hoped. Yes, it's a game based entirely around the series' popular Crash mode, but not quite the way you'd imagined it...

Set for release on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network this fall, the game will feature three different game modes spread across six locations and 18 crash junctions. Crash! will also make use of the Autolog leaderboard/social tech that Criterion introduced with last year's Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.

Crash! will also be support??ing Kinect for Xbox 360, with two teams competing against one another while using motion gestures to control and?? crash vehicles.

Not sure how I feel about the top down perspective, but I'll withhold judgment until I play it myself or hear more from our folks at EA's showcase today. Look out for a hands-on preview and some more details on Burnout Crash! soon.

The post Burnout Crash! coming ?to XBLA, P?SN this fall (Update) appeared first on Destructoid.