Touted as a spiritual successor to Burnout 3, one of the best racing games ever made, the incredibly-named Danger Zone has just arrived on Xbox One nearly half a year after its original PS4 and PC debut. With such a great name and a great elevator pitch, I had high expectations for it. . . Boy, was I disappointed with the end result.

Despite being called a “new Burnout 3,” Danger Zone is, in fact, a recreation of just one of that game’s modes, most specifically one of the least interesting. Remember that crash mode? That one where you had to create chaos by crashing your car into a huge intersection and then detonate a bomb? That is Danger Zone in its bloody entirety. No races, no career, nothing. All you do here is crash a car on any of the game’s twenty short levels, and see how much property damage you can cause. This time around, the game doesn’t even take place in the real world, as all crashes take place in a virtual simulation, making the game a lot less interesting. Those aren’t the only problems, though.

One of the best aspects of the Burnout games was the soundtrack. Danger Zone has none. Besides some basic drifting, crashing and engine noises, the game features absolutely nothing else in the sound department, making its presentation even less appealing. Everything here looks cheap: the visuals (late-PS3 at best, with poor effects), the overall lack of speed (inconsistent 30 frames per second), the sound (or lack thereof), the extremely barebones gameplay (with below average driving physics), and most importantly, the complete lack of proper content. There’s just a single-player mode, with a few dozen tests, and that’s it. No unlockables, not even a single splitscreen mode, nothing. You can maybe have ten or fifteen minutes of fun playing the little Danger Zone has to offer, but that’s basically it. There’s almost nothing here to convince you to come back after one playthrough.

Danger Zone really disappointed me. Being the self-appointed spiritual successor to Burnout that it is, all it ever did was make me want to play Burnout 3 even more. It’s so dull compared to its older iterations it made me question if the Burnout games were even that good in the first place.

Never again will I buy a game for the sole reason it’s named after one of my favorite songs. If you’re making a game called “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” or “Even Flow,” your loss, I ain’t getting it!

Reviewed on Xbox One.
Also available on: PS4, PC