Danger Zone Xbox One Review

Danger Zone is very much the spiritual successor to the crash mode from the Burnout series. This isn’t surprising considering that developer Three Fields Entertainment was founded by people whom were previously members of Criterion, the developer behind the Burnout series.

Danger Zone takes place in ‘simulated’ arenas full of motorways, jumps and vehicles for you to crash into, all with the aim of racking up the highest score possible. This is the game in a nutshell. A level begins by panning over the area, allowing you a look at the different sections that you will need to cause metallic carnage on to gain a high score. Once that is complete, you basically race your own vehicle towards others, pushing them to and fro and causing mayhem as cars and lorries and buses and all manner of different vehicles collide with one another, exploding and driving off the sides of the road and all adding to your score as they crash.

Once you have crashed enough vehicles, you gain a Smashbreaker. This allows you to explode your own vehicle, and in doing this, it allows you to move the wreckage around the course. As you move, you can try and pick up more Smashbreakers, moving around as much of the course as possible and trying to explode as many vehicles as you can in your destructive wake. As you move about you can also grab monetary pickups, these also helping to boost your score.

As you can tell by now, Danger Zone is pretty basic in its premise, though this doesn’t mean it is any less fun; some of the most basic games are the most addictive, though I don’t think I would go as far as to call it that. Whilst causing chaos and mayhem is very enjoyable – watching vehicles smashing into one another continuously and feeling oddly satisfied to see your score ranking up – it doesn’t come without its bout of repetition, especially on the harder courses.

There are four Rank levels that you can gain: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and even the elusive Platinum, but I found it difficult to even get the Bronze ranking at times! You’ll need to get Bronze as the minimum requirement to progress on to the next stage, otherwise you have to retry the course again. If you are anything like me, you’ll find yourself repeating certain courses many times in order to even reach the lowest rankings, and this can be a cause for some monotony, though once you manage to get your vehicle to hit the sweet spot, it is certainly very enjoyable to just sit back and watch the consequences of your actions, the camera flipping between the best shots of carnage as it unfolds. It’s unfortunate that there’s no replays to see the chaos in its full glory, but it’s understandable when you take into consideration that Three Fields Entertainment are a very small team.

Unfortunately, clearly being made on a small budget, there’s not much more to the game. There’s no multiplayer, which would have only added to the enjoyment, and there’s not much in the way of different modes either. The difficulty of the levels increases as you progress, making for more challenging courses later on, though there’s not much room for variation, even in the design of the levels (everything takes place in a Tron-like arena). The only variation is with the layout of the main courses themselves, and with the different cars that you get to drive.

From the makers of Dangerous Golf, Three Fields Entertainment has still managed to bring yet another simple but satisfyingly destructive game, bringing back the Burnout crash mode and delivering nothing but explosive fun.