The so called spiritual successor is an intriguing concept, you take a video game franchise that is no longer active and team members of that original game build a sort of cheap ass sequel if you will and today's subject is the Danger Zone + Dangerous Driving series by Three Fields Entertainment.

Spiritual Successors can work, Bloodstained Ritual of the Night being the best example, while plenty of Project Gotham Racing's influence has shaped the racing genre for the last decade, Burnout falls under the same camp with Wreckfest and some of more recent Need for Speed games.
Three Fields of course being made up of ex-staff of Criterion, the makers of Burnout wanted to relive those glory days by starting with Burnout's very much missed crash mode that sets up a stunt track to create the biggest crash possible, the first game Danger Zone did everything in a make shift test lab before going to public roads in Danger Zone 2 and finally making the Burnout clone in Dangerous Driving.
This is where the comparison to Burnout ends as these games start missing the elements that made Burnout a complete game.
For Danger Zone 1 and 2 its the lack of raw destructive power that comes from unleashing a crashbreaker as well as a very janky set of physics that could make you fail instantly, not to mention a lack of music because Three Fields were too cheap to afford a composer, this problem is prevalent in Dangerous Driving as well although that one has much more glaring problems by the fact it looks and plays cheap, granted a team of 7 compared to a team of 70 does make for an unfair comparison but remember that these games were built on the remnants of a 19 year old game in Burnout 3 and there are smaller teams that have made solid games such as Among Us, Untitled Goose Game, Stardew Valley and Omno just to name a few, there really is no excuse for such mediocrity when the tools available can make alot of quality titles, budget or not.
Danger Zone 1 and 2 are both C-Tier titles while Dangerous Driving is a D-Tier, I call that generous considering that this studio doesn't have an original idea among them, even the re-releashed Burnout Paradise is doing better than them.