BURNOUT PARADISE
Reviewed on PS3. Also on Xbox 360. Developed by Criterion. Published by EA.
Burnout, baby, Burnout. Burnout Paradise. As a lifelong conscientious objector to driving games, I am playing a driving game.
So Burnout is one of the first games whereby there’s no discernible difference between the PS3 and Xbox 360. In fact, BP is meant to be slightly better on PSTripple. I bought it on PS3 since its region free and EA’s 360 games aren’t region free. That and the fact the Sixaxis was gathering more dust than an Xbox 360 in Tokyo.
So Burnout Paradise is a driving game set in a sandbox. You can drive almost anywhere in Paradise City and there’s an event at most major intersections. You can have simple races against other cars. Marked Man races in which all the other cars are trying to run you off the road before you reach the finishing line, Road Rage where you have takedown a set number of enemy cars, Burning Route which is a time trial for specific cars and Stunt Event, where you have to string tricks together using jumps, hand-brake turns, boost and spins.
Simple. You choose what you want. And I’m shit at races, I’ve been concentrating more on the other modes to progress. This game has different classes of licenses (Class D and up) and as you progress to a new class of licence, the level of difficulty increases as does the number of events you need to win before you reach the next level. Of course, you can set your own races at any time with a well thought out online system (on PS3 since that’s what version I tested). Or it would if I had any friends with PS3′s and Burnout.
You also have occasion to ‘takedown’ other cars in order to add them to your collection, which is always fun. I found the game to be quite accessible for people like myself who aren’t big driving game fans (remember- one of the main reasons I loved Crackdown was because it was the only GTA game that you don’t need to win races in order to progress). I found the takedowns to be rather easy once you used the right car for the job, and races got easier later in the game, but stunt runs became more difficult for some reason. You can also set up big crashes, but these are more at the mercy of the traffic and where it happens to be at the time. There is no restart event button as there was on older Burnout games but I haven’t worried too much about it.
The graphics are superb, mostly running at 60fps (apart from some cutscenes where applied video filters make the game run at a still great 30fps. I also played the 360 demo and that looked and sounded just as good (but with custom soundtracks and XBox Live).The crashes look great (as they should)The sound is also excellent apart from two caveats- 1 half of the soundtrack is music from the first three games (ie crap techno) and DJ atomica is such an amazing bland Ryan Seacrest- clone.
So you have a bunch of Brits making the ultimate ode to American and Japanese cars. I couldn’t give a fuck about Gran Turismo Pay to Demo or Need for Speed or whatever- this is an awesome game.
C1 Rating: 2/3
UPDATE:
Recently, I revisited Burnout for a day, installing the recent patch introducing motorbikes. I like driving the cars in Burnout. The bikes, not so much.
