Geekshow

Review – Burnout Paradise (XBox 360/PS3)

Welcome to Paradise City, home of blistering speed, insane stunts, and bone-crunching wrecks…

I tend to gravitate towards arcade-style racing games. If I wanted to experience reality, I’d just go drive my own car. I like playing games where I can crash into things and generally drive like a maniac without having to worry about tinkering with my virtual ride to improve performance. Burnout Paradise fulfills these inclinations in spades. If you aren’t burning through traffic, flying off ramps, and crashing through billboards, you aren’t experiencing all of the addictive fun that Paradise City has to offer.

Multiple Cars + High Speeds = Car-Flipping Fun!

It’s a good thing that the collisions in Burnout Paradise look really great because crashing into buildings, trees, signs, fences, and other vehicles is a frequent occurrence. The physics system in place assures that every single crash looks completely different, so it never gets old seeing the carcass of your former vehicle bounce and hurtle down the street. The game achieves a great sense of speed as you race down the street, making collisions that much more thrilling when they occur and avoiding crashes just as nail-biting. You will often find yourself flying through traffic, jockeying for position among a group of cars racing for the finish line, and having a blast doing so.

The entirety of Paradise City is there to explore from the beginning of the game, and it takes a long time to find every single nook, cranny, and shortcut. The city is a very large and varied place containing many different areas including downtown high-rises, beach front property, curvy country roads, railroad tracks, and a packed freeway. Some areas of Paradise City seem to be perpetually under construction, providing many ramps, drop-offs, and shortcuts to take advantage of.

There are many ways to experience Paradise City. Each stoplight hosts one of five different types of events to participate in, should you choose to activate it. The Race event is fairly self-explanatory, although there aren’t any set routes. Instead, each race ends at one of eight different landmarks throughout the city. How you get there is up to you as long as you cross the finish line first. Marked Man events are a variation on a normal race in which several cars are trying to take you down before you can reach the finish line. The goal of a Road Rage event is to take down a certain number of cars within a set time limit without totaling your car in the process. Complete as many tricks and jumps as you can for big points in Stunt Runs, and race against the clock using a specific car for each Burning Route.

Discount airlines can be a little scary at times.

The open world design of Burnout Paradise lends itself towards cruising around the place looking for things to do. Paradise City is chock full of events and challenges to complete, but the game is still fun to play even if you are just speeding around from street to street. Burnout Paradise encourages this by letting you “own” every individual street in the game in two ways. It will keep track of your fastest times racing down a road and your highest scores in Showtime mode on each street. In Showtime mode, your car is sent careening down the road, and the object is to cause as much damage as possible to other cars and the environment before your car comes to a rest. Using your boost will keep your car twisting and flipping down the road, making it possible to crash for several minutes at a time. Once you have the fastest time and the highest Showtime score on a road, you “own” it. This feature of the game is especially fun when you have several friends that also own the game because all of your scores are uploaded to Burnout’s online servers. This means you will get a fast time on a street only to find that one of your friends has beaten it the next time you boot up the game. Every time you turn onto a new street, the game displays who owns the road, setting up competition with your friends, even when you are technically playing offline.

If you don’t want to participate in any events or compete against your friends’ best times, there is still plenty of fun to be had in Paradise City. There are 400 gates to smash down, 120 billboards to crash through, and 50 Super Jumps to discover. These things are hidden all around Paradise City, oftentimes in places that lie off the beaten path. Finding all the gates, billboards, and jumps is an especially good way to learn the ins and outs of Paradise City, giving you more of an edge during events. There are also about a dozen parking garages throughout the city that provide several opportunities for catching big air.

Sometimes a single wheel is all you need.

At any point while driving around the city, you can bring up the online menu with a quick tap on the right of the D-pad. Regardless of what mode you choose, you seamlessly jump into an online game wherever you are on the map. You can choose to join a specific type of event such as a race, but the real fun comes from Freeburn Challenges. As the name implies, Freeburn allows a group of players to cruise around Paradise City doing whatever they like. The mode includes a long list of challenges for everyone to attempt based on the number of players available. Some challenges are competitive, pitting everyone against each other in a race to be the first to perform a task such as taking down a number of other cars or drifting for a particular distance. Other challenges are cooperative, tasking the entire group with completing objectives. All of the online features in Burnout Paradise are well-implemented and fun to play.

There are three different classes of cars in Paradise City that cater towards different types of driving. Speed cars are good for getting somewhere fast, but they also crash much more easily than the other two types. The boost for this type of car cannot be used until it is filled entirely, but boosts can be chained together by holding the boost button down. Aggression cars are tough vehicles that are good for knocking other cars around, but their top speeds aren’t as fast and they generally don’t handle as well. This type of car gains boost by taking out other cars and knocking things down, usable as long as there is boost left in the tank. Stunt cars lie somewhere in the middle, traveling faster than aggression cars and taking a bit more of a beating than speed cars. As the name implies, flying off ramps and performing other stunts will gain you boost to use whenever you like. Each car in your junkyard is rated according to its speed, boost, and strength abilities. As you progress through the game, you will unlock better and better cars, soon finding a few favorites that you will rely on for most of the heavy lifting.

When this baby hits 88 miles per hour...

If the original game wasn’t packed enough for you, Criterion Games is raising the bar for studios supporting their game after it hits retail. After it was released early in January 2008, Criterion released several free updates for Burnout Paradise throughout last year that added a ton of content to the game. The Bogart update fixed several early bugs with the game. The Cagney update added several new online challenges and made Stunt Run, Road Rage, and Marked Man events available to play online, along with several other tweaks to the game. Later in the year, Criterion released the Bikes pack which added a dynamic weather system and a customizable day-to-night cycle to Paradise City in addition to adding four motorcycles available to ride and several new challenges based around the new vehicle type. Soon after, trophy support was added to the PS3 version of the game. Recently, Criterion released another free update that further tweaks the game, including the ability to restart events, the most requested feature since the game was released.

This year, Criterion is beginning to release premium content for Burnout Paradise, continuing their support of the game. The Party Pack has already been released, featuring a “pass-the-controller” party mode for people playing the game together on the same console. The Legendary Cars pack will be released soon, making four different vehicles based on famous cars available to drive. These new cars were based on the DeLorean from Back to the Future, Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters, KITT from Knight Rider, and The General Lee from Dukes of Hazzard. Criterion has already announced several other premium content packs planned for release throughout 2009 including Toy Cars (another car pack), Big Surf Island (a new playable area added to the game), and Cops and Robbers (presumably a new event type).

It’s hard to find another game that offers a better value than Burnout Paradise. The original game was packed with features, and Criterion Games continues to support their game long after it hit shelves by providing a ton of new downloadable content. Paradise City is a fun place to play, and it should continue to be so for a long time to come.

Final Grade: A