Burnout 3: Takedown is Criterion Games' 2004 arcade racer that turns high-speed aggression into the core of its design, rewarding players for smashing rivals, chaining boost, and turning crashes into spectacle.
Burnout 3: Takedown was developed by Criterion Games and published by Electronic Arts for PlayStation 2 and Xbox. It arrived after two fast but comparatively lean entries and became the point where the series' identity fully snapped into focus: speed, danger, and deliberate vehicular violence.
The central addition is the takedown, a system that rewards players for forcing opponents into traffic, walls, barriers, and other cars. Instead of treating crashes only as failure, the game builds its racing rhythm around controlled risk, aggressive lines, boost management, and the satisfaction of watching a rival wreck in slow motion.
Its World Tour structure mixes standard races with Road Rage events, elimination-style battles, time attacks, and Crash mode scenarios built around causing the largest pileup possible. The result is an unusually broad arcade racer where every event type reinforces the same physical language of speed, impact, and recovery.
The presentation is loud and kinetic, with bright courses, heavy motion blur, dramatic crash cameras, and a licensed soundtrack that frames the game as a mid-2000s action-sports event. Online multiplayer on the original Xbox and PlayStation 2 releases extended that energy into competitive races and takedown battles.
Burnout 3: Takedown was one of 2004's major critical successes, earning a Game Developers Choice Awards Game of the Year nomination and BAFTA Games nominations for art direction, online multiplayer, and technical direction, winning the BAFTA technical direction category. It also appears on modern all-time lists from The Guardian and IGN.