Burnin' Rubber 5 HD

What happened to all the great arcade-style racing games? We used to have Burnout, Midnight Club, Ridge Racer and Blur, but now the closest thing we get to this style of aggressive racer is The Crew. Where did all the great arcade racers go?

I'm not sure I would call Burnin' Rubber 5 HD a "great" racing game, but when you're dying of thirst, even toilet water sounds good. It's basically Burnout with guns, a killer combination that, while extremely rough around the edges and nowhere near as good as Criterion's racing franchise, is still better than nothing.

If you're wondering how you could have possibly missed so many Burnin' Rubber sequels, then you're probably like me and have a blind spot for browser games. This comes to us from Xform Games, a publisher that is best known for embedding their free titles onto their popular website. Now they've brought the long-running Burnin' Rubber series to Steam for the first time ever, and the result is a slightly better than average arcade-style racing game.

With three dozen events to compete in, several race modes and a bunch of boss fights, there's actually quite a bit of content in Burnin' Rubber 5 HD. For the most part, the idea is to come in first, even if that means blowing up the competition with missiles, flamethrowers and laser guns. Other events will play into the combat, such as having you trying to shoot down ten opponents before they get you.

Although you've seen a lot of these ideas in other arcade racers, Burnin' Rubber does something you don't see very often. Instead of going solo in the combat races, you'll occasionally be paired up with three different cars, all of which you can switch between at a push of a button. It's such a simple idea, but it changes how you approach the takedown events. You'll also be able to customize and equip different weapons on each of these cars, adding that extra layer of depth I wasn't expecting.

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Beyond the team challenges, Burnin' Rubber 5 HD plays out pretty much as you would expect. There are 36 events to compete in that will take you through a desert, into the snowy hills, underneath a city and onto the freeway in the middle of the night. It doesn't have an especially large selection of tracks, but they all look a little different and some have hidden shortcuts to use to your advantage.

Thankfully, the combat is a lot more varied than the stage selection. You start out with the normal guns and missiles, but will eventually be able to equip all kinds of high-powered weapons on the top, sides and even hood of the car. You can equip three different weapons in all, which includes a special attack that will often put the car in autopilot and change your perspective. You can replenish your weapons by picking up the colored items scattered around the course.

The good news is that Burnin' Rubber 5 HD gets a lot of the basics right. The action is fast, there are a lot of weapons to choose from and the cars are generally easy to control. Unfortunately, I wasn't as excited about the track designs. I like that we're given several different backgrounds, but the stages themselves are often short and kind of bland. These are not the long, winding and imaginative courses you saw in Burnout 3: Takedown, but rather bite-sized events that have a hard time standing out.

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Sadly, this is not the only indication that you're playing a port of an old browser game. Burnin' Rubber 5 HD looks and plays the part, but I could never shake that something was a little off. The cars lack any weight, the handling is loose, the computer AI is ridiculously stupid and there is never a good sense of speed here. It reminds me a lot of the budget titles we used to see from Activision, where it was painfully clear that corners were cut to make it to store shelves at a price you couldn't resist. This is a $10 game that feels exactly like a $10 game.

While it never comes close to hitting the highs of games like Burnout and Midnight Club, Burnin' Rubber 5 HD does just enough right to be a fun arcade-style racing game. It's rough around the edges and often feels like a budget title, but what it lacks in polish it more than makes up for with content. More than anything else, this game makes me want to see what a Burnin' Rubber 6 might look like. Bring it on, Xform.