Burnout Paradise

"Fun for the casual gamer, but the hardcore racer should look elsewhere"

'Welcome to the Ultimate Driving Playground' is what's written on the back of the game's box, and indeed the game pretty much gears you into a city and just says 'do whatever you want.' Now, don't expect anything on the level of Grand Theft Auto or Crackdown - because, as you know, this is a driving game. A Burnout game, to be precise.

So, instead of telling you what the game isn't, I'll tell you what it is and how it works:

The game kindly donates you one car at the beginning of the game, a hunter cavalry. You unlock new cars by competing in 'events' - to start an event you pull up at a set of traffic lights and hold on reverse and accelerate at the same time. Every set of traffic lights in the game has its own corresponding event - so there's no shortage of these. There are five types of event: marked man, race, burning route, stunt run, and road rage. Race is self explanatory, burning route is like a race but you only race against the clock, there's no opponents. Marked man and road rage are similar, in marked man you have to get from A to B without being demolished by the other cars, and in road rage you have to take down as many other cars as possible without getting taken down. In stunt run you rack up points by doing tricks and stuns.

When you complete events you earn points on your license, and you might even unlock a car. If you unlock a car the game brings in a 'Curious Driver' who cruises around the city, if you take him down you earn his car, which you then get from your local scrap yard. Why couldn't the game just put the car in your collection instead of making you feel like a filthy thief scraping your cars from a scrap yard? Oh well, when you get enough points you'll upgrade your license, giving you a new car and resetting all the 'events' so the ones you've done will start giving you license points again.

That's basically how the game works. When you want to go online you can get on quickly enough, but there's nothing you can do with random strangers unless they're really cool, since most challenges involve you all meeting up in the same place and doing things, so if you want to complete the challenges, you'll need to hook up with people you know. It's great fun though, the challenges, they really add an extra dimension to the game and doing them all unlocks you cars. Now that you know how the game works, we'll get into the main review.

Gameplay

The gameplay is, on the whole, good - though a little repetitive: there are only 5 different even types and, chances are, you'll have played them all in the first hour of playing. There's no added diversity, if you want more you have to set up your own races online. Having said this, they are very fun to do - particularly the road rage and stunt runs. My complaint here is that, until you get a better license, the events are all too easy. Which means you'll get to an A license very quickly - unlocking approximately half of the games cars, with very little challenge whatsoever. After this, the difficulty is ramped up considerably, particularly as you complete more and more events with that license. This makes things a bit better, but once you've completed everything there's no incentive to go back and perfect every race to the maximum, it simply doesn't carry the same appeal as something like Project Gotham Racing for a hardcore gamer - this is definitely one for the more casual gamer.

Another problem, intrinsic to the game design, is that should you fail a race, you have to drive back to the junction you started it from and begin it again, while in other games you'd restart the race at the very click of a button. This gets quite annoying. Another problem is with takedowns, you get taken down all too easily sometimes, because the takedown mechanics weren't quite perfected for the games release. A patch has been brought out to resolve this issue.

Graphics

The graphics themselves are great in this game, there is NEVER any framerate drops at any point and things can get quite hectic on the screen sometimes. The cars look stunning, especially in HD. The game shows every crash in slow motion, and it actually looks very cool - with shards of metal flying all over the place and broken glass everywhere.

Overall design

The decision to make a GTA-style map rather than just 'tracks' has brought with it some great gameplay gems, but it has also thrown some frustrating things in too. Then there's also the great developing decisions, and the awful ones - all covered in this section.

There are many secret areas in Paradise City, the online challenges encourage you to get out there and discover them, often forcing you to get to them to complete challenges. The map is huge a good mixture of busy streets and quiet country roads to tear about on. Actually, tearing about the city by yourself, outside of races, is actually pretty fun. There's lots of billboards to smash and secret gates to crash through which earn you cars if you do them all - a very cool and addictive element to the game, certainly a great design decision.

What wasn't so great, though, is there are no humans in this game. Paradise City literally contains a bunch of remote controlled cars and one radio presenter. Your car contains nobody, everyone elses car contains nobody, and the streets are constantly empty. All this serves to do is to make the game get more repetitive, more quickly. There's nobody around and that design decision is, frankly, unforgivable - because it makes things look very stupid, and - psychologically - this makes the game less fun than it could have been.

Another annoyance is that there is no night time in this game... its always sunny... there isn't even any cool weather effects. This is a grave let down, and a waste of the PS3's capabilities I'm sure. It also serves to make the game yet more repetitive.

Each car is unique, with its own feel - making each car worthwhile unlocking and keeping the experience fresh as far as handling is concerned. A very good design decision.

Once all the challenges are done, and all the races complete, there's very little to keep you playing. The game doesn't record your time for each event so you don't know what your best scores have been, so there's nothing to aim for. The closest you can come is to set 'road rules' where you get from one end of a street to the other and the game records your time. This is nowhere near as cool as a race though, there's no corners, no opponents, it just lacks the appeal. Plus there's too many streets, so this will be a major turn off for hardcore players looking to play the heck out of this game.

Conclusion

To wrap up, there is a lot of fun packed into this game, especially if you can get online with friends. But if you're a hardcore racing gamer who likes perfecting every corner to get the perfect lap time, I don't think this game will cut if for you. Also, this game gets pretty repetitive with limited game modes, though - granted - less repetitive than any other racing game I've played - though this isn't hitting the same hardcore market that those games are, making this attempt at a racing game slightly schizophrenic in its approach - making this game a fun single player expedition if you're a casual gamer who likes his racing. There's some bad design decisions that will get on your nerves, but there's also some awesome ones to boot. If you're willing to play the game for the fun then you'll get a lot out of it!

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 03/10/08

Game Release: Burnout Paradise (EU, 01/25/08)