Burnout Paradise

February 1,2008 - Burnout is back once again and has gotten a radical change in its approach to bring that signature adrenaline racing to the masses. Instead of menu-based racing, Burnout Paradise features an open world to let players tackle the game their way and choose their own path to its conclusion. The recent demo has disappointed as many as it has pleased, so does the final game manage to stand up to the series’ reputation or does it fall just short of a burnout?

Instead of races taking place around the world, Burnout Paradise takes place in, oddly enough, just Paradise City. Not just in predetermined paths in the city, but all throughout the it in this new open world structure. The city itself is absolutely huge, from the countryside to the various parts of the city that are influenced by several cities and even the past Burnout games, as well. Though it’s not necessarily the city that makes the game enjoyable, but the freedom the game offers and the variety of things to do in Paradise City.

The previous Burnout games also had a sense of freedom in how you tackled the variety of events they offered, but they don’t really hold a candle to what Paradise has to offer. At each of the 120 traffic lights around the city, you can start one of five event types (Road Rage, Marked Man, Race, Burning Trial, and Stunt Run) with a press of both triggers. Besides the Road Rage and Stunt Run events, everything else ends at one of eight different end locations, for the eight points of a compass. It takes a bit of time to get used to the city to navigate towards these locations more easily, but with the help of the street indicator and minimap, it won’t take long to learn your way around the city. The lack of the ability to retry missions may be a big concern for some, but it becomes a minute point once you see that there are events nearby and other things you can do that it becomes a moot point. The driving itself still has that Burnout feel, with some improvements to things like post-takedown control to show that the gameplay has evolved along with the rest of the game. That tough AI from previous Burnouts is back and even tougher than before, don’t expect to get through any event without a scratch along the way.

Besides the organized events, there are lots of stuff to discover and smash through that keep you busy in between events. Showtime is one of the bigger changes in content, as it replaces the Crash mode with a more Pain-like mode where you press the RB and LB buttons to send your car tumbling, hitting cars and buses to rack up monetary damages and by pressing the A button, you can ooch your car around the streets. As you play through the game, new cars are unlocked that become rogue AI that are let loose in the city that you must take down to add them to your junkyard collection of cars. Cars are now organized into speed, stunt, and aggression categories that should give you an idea of where they’re best used just by name alone. Paradise already has a lot of stuff to keep you busy without adding in the online component.

It may be hard to grasp, but the online component of Burnout Paradise is not much different than the offline game. That’s because when you join a freeburn, the fancy name for the online component, nothing changes at all in the world. Your city stays the same while up to seven other players are now in your city, free to play in this sandbox alongside you as much as you like or you can organize the mayhem a little more. Races can be set up for the group to play in or the group can go for challenges, which are essentially achievements specifically made for a group of friend to collect. Making use of those lonely HD cameras you may have bought, every time you takedown a friend online, they’ll have their picture taken to rub in the humiliation of defeat. You don’t necessarily have to be in this online mode to have an effect online, as the Road Rules mode allows you to play in personal leaderboards with friends for time and showtime leaderboards. The time part of Road Rules gives you the task of races down the entire length of one road faster than your friends while the showtime part lets you try to set the high score for that particular street. If you manage to own both showtime and time high scores for one street, you then own that street, at least until a friend beats your score and takes it back.

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