Crash and burns, exploding cars and a flaming wreck. All these describe the game because that’s what it felt like and not in the way they meant it to be. Made by Three Fields Entertainment, featuring the people who worked on Burnout, this game is a spiritual successor to the “Crash” mode of the Burnout games, so expectations were somewhat high.
The game has fairly basic gameplay mechanics. Create as much destruction as possible by crashing into cars and blowing yourself up, something which was also the basic mechanic of the “Crash” mode. While even though, it is somewhat fun, it gets tiresome after a while and feels like a chore. The game lacks any type of depth to it. There’s just one car to choose from, the stages are all inside an underground bunker where the stages are then “generated”. No upgrades of any sort or any real sense of progression in the game. The only thing that does give you any sense of accomplishment is an online leaderboard.
There are 4 tutorial levels that get you familiar with the mechanics i.e “Smashbreakers” that allow you to blow up and “Grand Slam” which is picking up money tokens that then give you extra money/score at the end for collecting them all in order. Besides that, there are 3 test phases that have a total of 20 levels in total. There’s no Steamworkshop support or custom level designing, which means that those levels are all you’re going to play. The car doesn’t handle too well so collecting the pickups was also a little challenging.
In terms of visuals, the game does look pretty good with fantastic explosions and sparks. The fires that linger on after are pretty good too. Textures are pretty good as well so you could say that it uses the Unreal Engine quite well in that regard. There is no vehicle damage besides the wheels falling off and the car turning grey with scratches once you crash. No real sense of damage which is a bummer because it would’ve been fun to see how mangled the car could get. Or a bus that you T-boned into. Audio wise the sound effects go great with the explosions and the music is also decent.
Danger Zone is not a bad game mechanically speaking, it’s just lacking content. It’s great if you want to just blow stuff up and smash into cars but don’t expect carnage similar to that of Burnout or even the speed. However, I do feel that with more updates and polish this game could turn from an “eh” game to a game that’s actually fun.
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