The Burnout series has already received critical acclaim for their carnage-packed gameplay on the consoles and Criterion Games has tried to distil the Burnout recipe into the tight footprint of the iPad.  As part of this squeeze, Burnout Crash! takes an overhead view of the action and is separated into different levels, each comprising of a junction or intersection with different cars entering and exiting and you trying to destroy everything in sight.

Each level starts with your car powering towards the intersection and then strategically stopping  in the most inconvenient position, blocking as much traffic as possible and causing as much destruction as possible.  After your first car crash, it can then be inexplicably dragged around the intersection, causing even more chaos. At the bottom of the screen is the Crashbreaker bar that fills up every few seconds, at which point it causes your car to explode.  Anything in close vicinity to your car when the Crashbreaker sets off is pushed aside and possibly set alight - the Crashbreaker can even destroy any nearby buildings. Anything onscreen is a possible target - escaping cars, buildings, airplanes, boats, caravans - even air traffic control towers.  

The action is frenetic as you need to cause a certain amount of damage in a short amount of time.  You get points for all the destruction you cause and extra points for specific goals (eg destroying a gold car, allowing an ambulance to go through etc).  Some levels require you to fill up a crash meter before triggering “features”, destructive forces like UFOs, tidal waves and the like that carve a path of destruction through the intersection, destroying all and sundry.  Also, another object to keep an eye out for is the pizza van, that when destroyed, allows you to spin the Pizza Wheel of Fortune, that rewards you with  in-play bonuses (speeding up/slowing down/heat seeking missiles/armoured vans).

Each level has a number of goals in place and each of the goals earn you a star to be used to gain additional cars and levels.  There are only a limited number of levels (only 18) in the game, making the game pretty short, but loads of fun while it lasts.  Music is hilarious with smatterings of classic tunes and crazy radio-announcer-like catchcries.  With the features and the points and the weird music, this is seriously the closest thing I have played to a poker machine on the iPad without actually playing a poker machine.  The range of different things happening (ambulances, armoured vehicles, pizza vans, cars escaping) all set to the zany music and sound is just crazy fun.  It feels a lot like eating junk food - not a lot of substance, it attacks your senses in different ways, not particularly good for you but great while it lasts - but afterwards, the satisfaction does not stay around for very long.  All in all, a nice fun diversion of a game.