Game Discussion of The Week: Burnout series

I don't think I've missed any game in the series so far, I've played Burnout, Burnout 2 Point of Impact, Burnout 3 Takedown, Burnout Revenge, Burnout Legends, Burnout Dominator and Burnout Paradise.

Burnout 2 was the high point of the series for me, before they switched over to EA and got the flash over substance makeover. After that I lost most of my interest. I own most games in the series but rarely, if ever, play them. Some I've played but after I bought copies for myself I haven't touched them, not even taken the plastic wrapping off some of them yet and probably won't, at least not for a long time, if ever..

Overall the stop and go combined with heavily luck based gameplay ruins it for me more than anything.

A couple of examples, first on crashes:
I always turn off the crash camera for when opponents crash. I wish I could crash and just let it play out without major damage and afterwards land safely if lucky enough and still keep playing without it going into crash+aftertouch mode every single time automatically. It devalues the epic crashes when it's so frequent and overly easy to pull off to the point where I want to avoid seeing an epic crash, that to me is the worst possible thing you can do to a crash, making me want to avoid it. The Burnout series has ruined epic crashes for me, at least in it's own series but sadly also a bit in other games, I just don't feel the satisfaction watching crashes anymore, and it's all Burnout's fault.

Secondly, luck based gameplay of the worst possible kind:
When you do specific racing challenges at blistering high speeds with pinpoint accuracy the traffic can screw you up on random as it doesn't follow a pattern you can learn, this leads to extreme frustration as at any point in time the challenging race you're trying to complete can end at any point as there could be cars on the road at any point where you simply can not see nor react to them before it's too late, like coming around corners or driving over hills, making the entire challenge not about precision and reward for beating a hard challenge but a struggle against frustration and waste of time that could've been spent having fun in better games instead.

The music also turned to absolute shit after the second game. I loved the music in the first two games before it consisted of garbage garage rock bands and other terribly unfitting music, thankfully it can be muted but having to mute an entire soundtrack game after game after game isn't exactly a good thing.

The visuals and driving mechanics have been kept on a nice and high level all the way through though, so at least I have no complaints about the graphics.

Overall I'd say the series lands on a mediocre 3/5 for me, mostly because of how good the first two games are, it started high then dropped too soon and too hard for any higher score as a whole.

Armored Core Raven - Since I don't know the series too much (only have played a few minutes of one of them, I think it was 2 and was pretty good), your post is really helpful, thank you.

The series definitely looks interesting, but, as Spirit Bomb, I also don't enjoy racing games in general, with the exception of Daytona USA and the Sonic & All-Stars series.