Burnout Paradise

"A good game that is cursed with too many flaws, issues, and other problems"

Summary: First, I avoid racing games LIKE THE PLAGUE. But, this one appeared different at first glance. After starting the game up, I was actually overwhelmed at everything you could do. Basically, they say "Here's the keys, here's this city, go have fun". It feels a bit like Grand theft auto, but still has a HUGE amount of problems. My biggest annoyance being that once you complete 250 of the 350 online challenges, there is NO reason to complete any more. You don't get a car, you don't get an achievement, no special mode unlocked, not even a thank-you message. It just switches from 349/350 to 350/350.


Game Play 6/10: It's a driving game, basic driving controls. But there's a lot of things that could be fixed. Such as, there's no horn (Not big I know, but bear with me). However, there is evidence that a horn feature was intended as if you click the left thumb stick when you have one of the police cars, your lights turn on. At the same time however, even if your lights are off, other players can click the left thumb stick and your lights turn on (on their system). WTF is up with that? Moving on, the take-down system has been ravaged horribly since the last game. There are no more Multi-car take-downs. Also, it seems incredibly broken as in online play, you can drive past someone without making contact and they occasionally go flying into space, or, another issue with it is that you can barely tap some cars and they get taken down, while other cars will take you down if they are stationary and you hit them at 500 miles an hour. This doesn't appear A number of times online, I've used one of the heavier cars and smashed into people using the first or second car of the game and gotten taken out. But at the same time, they will smash into me and we will both wreck resulting in no-one getting taken out. The crash system seems to be a bit broken, as not only did they remove "crash breaker", but you can't after-touch. Yea, you can bounce down a street hitting cars for hours racing up a huge score, but it turns into tedious after about the 3rd time. It just seems like the game was rushed and that resulting in not only a huge amount of glitches, but also a huge amount of removed or broken features.

Graphics 7/10: Now, the graphics are incredible, but at the same time, there is a problem. The draw distance for the city is amazing, you will never run out of ground or fall into "blue hell". However, traffic draw distances are a big problem. Once you start going very very fast with some of the cars, traffic tends to spawn directly in front of you, as once the car's spawning starts (picks car, colors, etc), you are either at or past where the car would spawn. This results in crashing directly into cars that spawn without warning, or in traveling very far with no traffic until the game auto-corrects and spawns a ton of cars all over the place, which usually means a crash for you. In my online play races, we just started turning traffic off, because the person in first place would be so far ahead of the traffic spawning, that occasionally everyone would get cars spawned almost right in front of them.

Sound 8/10: Vroom, Screech, and some good music about summarizes the audio experience for the game.

Storyline N/A: Racing game....

Multiplayer 4/10: At first, the multi player looks great. but once you start to use it you become plagued with people getting dropped by the EA servers, EA server crashes, the fact that you need to find a way to keep 8 people in a room with 1 guy who has never driven a car in his entire life tries to do a barrel-roll off of a collapsed hanger and through a suspended plane fuselage, not to mention that during that time, your guaranteed AT LEAST one of the people will drop and need to be re-invited. It can be near-impossible to get the 8 player achievements quickly unless you have all friends in the room, because people leave when they get irritated. I can honestly say that I have NEVER submitted so much bad feedback for leaving early up until I started my 6, 7,and 8 player challenges. By the way, all of the player challenges are the same challenges with different numbers of players. Example: Challenge one for 2 player is each person press the boost button. Challenge one for 8 players is Each person press the boost button. All the challenges are the same, and only the number of players and amount of brain damage induced through irritation is changed.


Overall 6/10: The main problem is that your reward for hours and hours and hours of challenge completing is NOTHING, and a great number of removed features from previous burnouts as well as a semi-broken take-down and crashing system. If you can get past that, this is actually an INCREDIBLE game. I really wanted to rate it higher, but I have to take points off because of the issues this game has.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/30/08

Game Release: Burnout Paradise (US, 01/22/08)