If it is indeed true that revenge is a dish best served cold, you’d have to assume that Criterion have gone and got things horribly wrong with their latest Burnout game. The sheer amount of sweat, nerves and explosive outbursts of temper that it seems to invoke with the merest smash or crash of your once shiny piece of vehicular mayhem feels more like a plate of ready meal revenge burnt to flaming husk by an overactive microwave. To be fair, that intro may actually have got you thinking that Burnout: Revenge isn’t up to much.

Please, don’t go thinking that. My strained retinas and twitching, raw hands would never forgive you. The thing with Revenge, as with previous instalments, is that once you pick the thing up and place the little disc inside your Xbox 360 disc tray you are going to have a heck of a hard time levering the thing out again. Retaining everything which made Burnout 3 such an essential purchase and building upon it whilst adding a lovely new-gen gleam, Revenge once more ramps up the stakes and gives the player plenty of modes to cause all sorts of motorised madness.

The main meat of the offline mode is once more the World Tour, which sees players racing their way up through ten ranks full of equivalent events to unlock locations, cars and crash junctions. Favourites such as the classic six-car race and eliminator make another appearance, and are joined at the party by Traffic Attack, a mode which takes advantage of a change in the way that the game allows you to interact with the traffic dotted around you. Instead of having your car grind to a steaming, dented halt upon contact with smaller cars headed in the same direction as you, hitting such traffic in Revenge will see the unfortunate member of the public sent cart wheeling or spinning – sometimes even both – off at all angles.

This leaves the experience of Revenge feeling very much different to previous titles. Whereas racing and lapping in Burnout 3 became tricky dashes between anything and everything that loomed large in your field of vision, the latest version can often see you piling straight through whole lines of traffic. It’s by no means the quickest route through and to an extent people who carefully thread their way through the traffic will still arrive at their destination a bit quicker than those who go the Takuma Sato route, but in reality you’ll soon notice that you’re more than able to get the gold medals with quite a bit of traffic smashing still included, meaning that at the end of the equation you feel that perhaps the challenge has been lessened to a degree.

Not that it has become any less fun, mind. Initial disappointment at the ability to go headlong into everything will soon fade when you are out on circuit with the opposition trying their damnedest to turn your car into a wall-mounted two-dimensional mosaic. The sheer ferocity of your foes is quite something, and even experience in dealing with what were still highly violent foes in Burnout 3 won’t quite prepare you for the regularity and brutality of Revenge’s AI. Despite this, Criterion have pleasingly balanced the game so that good, precise driving will see you rewarded and your opponents won’t cling to your rear bumper via an invisible rubber band.

The circuits themselves have been given a huge overhaul this time around, and most now offer a variety of routes and shortcuts that the player can use if they see fit. Some of these are rather more risky than others; one in particular requires the player to take a tricky edge-of-cliff route and jump over a gaping ravine to safety. This in turn lead to an utterly hilarious moment where Jay perfected the route, jumped the jump… and slammed straight into the side of the cliff, before his car slid down it in true Wacky Races fashion. That’ll be going straight into the UltraGN scrapbook, then!*

As the game’s subtitle hints, revenge is the main theme for Burnout’s 4th instalment. Been shunted into a bridge pillar by some squalid little blighter? The game will make it plainly obvious to you whom of your fellow racers did it via a red arrow hanging above their head, and returning the favour will see you rewarded with copious boost juice. It’s a nifty addition to what was already an adrenaline-fuelled atmosphere, and piling a rival’s car into a concrete gateway a few minutes after they did pretty much the same is a superbly rewarding feeling.

The system really comes into its own on Xbox Live, as you could probably imagine. Sideswiped into a lorry by lolhax0r32? Don’t worry – the game will remember and make sure you know about it for future races. Plunged off a jump into omfglol2006? He’ll be more than able to track you and return the favour at some point. It even goes as far as to remember and inform you in races on completely different days, weeks and months that a past rival is racing against you, giving you plenty of opportunity to initiate some sort of long-running feud.

The racing itself over Xbox Live proved to be pleasingly smooth too, even during the moments where our shredded cars were being hurled in each and every direction; something that seemed to happen with a rather depressing frequency. Lag hardly ever reared its head, and although there are but three modes to select from – Crash, Race and Road Rage (think blue team chasing red team) – each will provide addictive racing action that’ll keep you staring vainly into the near distance for hours on end. A handy leaderboard system provides more than enough incentive for you to keep plugging away online even when you’ve seen, done and bought the t-shirt of everything the single player game has to offer.

Whilst this is all well and great, the real icing on top of the cake comes from the fact that EA and Criterion have used the pause between PS2 and Xbox releases and the release of the Xbox 360 one to properly ramp the game up with some superb visuals. Lighting and particle effects are marvellous and whilst crashing should become frustrating, you’ll instead stare with a mixture of awe and slight guilty pride as your car tears itself to pieces in front of your eyes. Added together with a great soundtrack, Revenge certainly provides the audiovisual Daddies Sauce to the game’s pile of chips.

So, what of Burnout: Revenge, then? How can I nutshell things? It’s pretty simple really: it’s a game worth your cash. Everything provides as great an experience as you’d want from a racing game, and it’ll have you on the edge of your seats for more than a few hours with both the offline and online portions. Project Gotham 3 might take the slightly more sensible plaudits, but Burnout: Revenge takes the same feeling, multiplies it and injects it straight into your brain.

*Git.