Burnout Paradise

"The most fun I have had in a racer, maybe the most fun online ever!"

The Burnout series has been great to the arcade racing crowd. Even simulation nuts love it! Criterion came to soften the blow dealt by Burnout Revenge. While it had some nice features, it added traffic checking. Nuff' said. This is also Criterion's first open world game. Does it live up to the series' reputation? Lets find out.

Lets start off by telling Criterion how thankful I am for the support they give to the game. They gave us 12 months of free DLC, which included bikes. Now they are giving us paid DLC that is up to an amazing level of quality! Burnout Paradise is the most supported racer this generation, or probally the most supported overall game ever!

Visually, the game looks great. The cars have dynamic damage which includes loss of paint, metal bending, and physics for each individual piece of glass! The enviroments have a few rough textures, especially the airfield, (One of the main stunt locations) which has PS1 grade textures for the grass, most of the textures are as high res as high res can be though. But when eyes are being treated to colourful lights in the square along with a great draw distance, will you care?

The sound is also very good. Engines rev how you would expect engines to rev, and wheels skid how you would expect wheels to skid. The soundtrack is a bit dissapointing, rap and techno for an aggresive driving game just doesn't match. There is also not enough rock. Not to mention that the soundtrack created by Criterion is not very good. (I still love you Criterion) There is not enough rock either. But what is there is a good choice, well, apart from Avril... Oh and DJ Atomica? He is back to haunt burnout paradise...

Driving around paradise city is very cool, you might get your moneys worth just doing that. For an arcade racer, the handing is impressive, the cars, handle like real cars! Well, sort of. They all handle differently, which again, is impressive for an arcade racer! You don't just drive though, you can also do a bunch of stunts. Including barrel rolls, flats spins, e brake turns and drifting. As well as being an arcade racer, it had tony hawks style gameplay tucked in there for good measure, the best part is, the enviroment is designed around performing stunts.

The game revolves around doing 5 different types of events. Stunt run, marked man, road rage, burning route and of course, racing. In stunt run you try to chain together combinations of stunts to reach the score target. Marked man see's you on the run from black saloons trying to stop you from reaching your destination. As for road rage, any burnout fan should know that you smash rival drivers off the road to reach a particular takedown target. Here it is better than ever, because you get to take it around the entire city, the cars also stay in your vincinity, which ensures non stop action. Racing is just racing to the finish line against AI drivers. Burning route is the same, apart from the fact you're racing against the clock instead. All the events are fun, thanks to the enviroment being completely open while doing them. One wrong turn in some events can make you lose, so it can often be an excercise in frustration. Thanks to a DLC added restart feature, you never need to worry about drving back to the start location after failure. If you are offline and you are NOT buying the ultimate box, be prepared to go through multiple controllers, the restart feature is in a patch. Another thing that makes the events great is that they are all over the place. Pull up at a traffic signal then hit both the triggers, then you start whatever event happens to be assigned to the stop light.

Another nice addition is showtime, you hit both the bumpers then your car flips around the road hitting other cars and earning dollar damage for everything you break, this then gets assigned to the road you started showtiming on. Also, while free roaming, you get timed for how long it takes you to get to the other side of the road. If you beat the time, all your friends can see that you beat it. Then they can try to beat your time, even your showtime record! This is just the beginning for online capability though. You can invite your friends to a race, a road rage, a marked man competition, or even stunt run. Also you can roam around the city with them and do co op challenges, this may involve getting one player to jump over everyone else in one leap, to simple challenges like meeting up at a certain location. When you get taken out or you finish first, the vision camera takes a picture of your reaction. It is hillarious and a great reason to buy yourself a camera. As you seen at the start of the review, this is just the beginning. The game also has full scale support including DLC., with more to come more than a year after release! This includes everything from motorbikes to new online modes, new cars to new islands! It doesn't seem like it is gonna stop either, the announcements keep on rolling in.

Some of the DLC includes the legendary cars pack, new cars which do fun things when you hit L3, including hovering. They have 4 cars. They all look like famous cars, One looks like the general lee, one looks like the delorean, one looks like KITT. Even the Ecto 1 is in there! The party pack is a pass the pad multiplayer mode. You take turns doing a bunch of challenges, those are alot of fun! That is not all, but you should find out yourself.

Overall, I would reccomend this game to pretty much everyone, I am not a big racing game fan, but this is my most played game so far. If you have Xbox Live and a hard drive, buy the original version, you can get everything that you get in the ultimate box for cheaper. Buy the ultimate box if you are on PC or you have no Xbox Live or hard drive. Just don't miss out on this game.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 02/23/09

Game Release: Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box (EU, 02/06/09)