True to the mandate of the Burnout franchise, Burnout: Dominator for PlayStation2 has you driving recklessly in and out of traffic, pulling major drifts, catching some air or rubbing your opponents in order to gain boost power. Once your boost meter is full, you can lay down some supercharge just by holding down the turbo button -- and praying -- and driving as crazily as possible to fill a second meter that determines the amount of boost you'll have after your supercharge empties out; fill it before that and you're ready for another dose of supercharged craziness. A natural M.O., therefore, is to string together these supercharged sequences like candy on an assembly line.

Gone in Dominator, however, is the too-much-fun "crash mode," which may disappoint some fans of the series as it was one of the better modes in other Burnout games. Also gone is the "traffic attack" mode; in its place comes "maniac mode." The sole but polar difference between the two is that "maniac" has you trying to (narrowly) miss colliding with traffic whereas "attack" encouraged you to crash into everything. Darn political correctness.

Graphically speaking, Burnout: Dominator looks virtually identical to the last iteration, Burnout: Revenge, which isn't a necessarily a bad thing considering Revenge is a looker in its own right. Still, considering the need for avoidance, Dominator's visuals now make it difficult to discern the difference between moving traffic and plain old obstacles in the road, which makes unleashing your inner maniac problematic, because you can't really see what's coming at you -- or perhaps that makes it more conducive to maniacal driving?

Sadly too, there is no online play in Dominator, except for the ability to upload your stats via the PlayStation Portable (PSP) -- assuming you have one -- to an online server and compare them with other lone players.

There is an offline multiplayer mode where up to 4 can bang around, but that seems so retro in this day and age; a good reason to hold off on buying Dominator if online competition is your thing, because you won't find it here while the other "improvements" are better described as mere "variations on a theme."

Still, Burnout: Dominator is a pretty solid game, familiar but bent more toward racing than demolition derby; a nice little change for the series.