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Burnout - from Takedown onwards, at least - was always defined by its focus, its unshakeable sense of what it was, and what it should be doing with its players. This was a driving game in which driving badly rewarded you with the magic juice that allowed you to drive even more badly. And when you finally crashed - from all that bad driving you'd been doing - you realised that there was nothing remotely final about this kind of crashing. Rather, you ascended on impact, shifting from the status of car to the status of holy wreckage - wreckage you could steer through wonderfully thick, staticky air, and then barrel into your oncoming enemies as the sparks slowed to become individual twills of golden confetti. In this respect, Dangerous Golf has as much a claim to representing that beloved series' final form as the glorious, if peculiarly expansive, Burnout Paradise. Paradise blew Burnout upwards and outwards, offering an entire city of havoc. Dangerous Golf - which is made by a team of core Criterion vets - shows what might have happened if the series had instead retracted, drawing in its fearsome energy until it dropped cars and wrecks altogether and reduced players to a single pinprick of destructive light, trailing fire and smoke, blasting through a world heaped with clutter, and leaving beautiful destruction in its wake.
In other words, it's a golf game that you play indoors. In toilets. In kitchens. In fancy ballrooms. In France there are halls of mirrors and baby grands. In England there are suits of armour to topple and bash. In the US and Australia there are burgers to upend from serving tables and gas station forecourts to reduce to flames. And you do all this with a wonderfully pared-back sense of what a golf game needs. No arcing arrows that show your potential path, no wind to take into account. No three-click ritual to calculate swing and force. Just aim with the camera and then push forward to fire the ball. How fast? Burnout fast. Always. Forever.
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