Burnout Paradise

This review covers the single player experience. Time permitting we’ll also be scrutinising the multiplayer version of this game post release. Stay tuned to find out if multiplayer takes the game to a new level or if it’s just an online version of the single player.


I’ll always remember the Burnout series as possibly the most accessible car game series ever. It wasn’t because the racing was easy – far from it. And it wasn’t because everyone loved the way the cars handled - there are plenty who don’t even consider these sorts of games in those terms. It was the most accessible car game ever because almost everyone can appreciate a good crash.

The thing about crashing your car is you don’t have to be good to do it. In fact it can help if you’re bad. A good racer would have the reflexes to dodge that oncoming car, but your girlfriend who just sat down to convince you to go out for dinner – she’ll plough into it head on. And minutes later you’re ordering pizza while she deliberately fails yet another race – and you haven’t even told her about Burnout’s Crash mode yet.

So here’s a question then. If you had the most accessible, most casual pick-up-and-play driving game in the history of the world, what would you do with it? Apparently, if you’re publisher Electronic Arts the answer is “Throw all of that away for an ‘open world’ that somehow completely misses both the point of the series and the point of open world style games in one fell swoop.” [That’s one longwinded answer – Ed]

I'd like to point out that Criterion Games has done a huge amount of things right with Burnout Paradise. The crashes are nothing short of jaw-dropping, the graphics are amazing and the sense of speed can demand Olympian twitch reaction times . But Burnout has always been this way; these elements along with the series’ trademark 'pick up and play' arcadey feel has cemented it as a perennial favourite at parties everywhere. Sure it might have suffered from Madden syndrome (same game with updated rosters and graphics), but let's face it - nobody is buying Burnout for the racing. They're buying it for the crashes - whether it is the thrill of slamming an opponent into a street sign, or racking up millions of dollars of damage in Crash mode. The Criterion Games response? Take out Crash mode. Of course.

Criterion replaces Crash mode with what they call Showtime Mode. By pressing the L1 and R1 buttons your car goes into Showtime mode – it’s similar to Crash mode, except you can’t really compete for the highest score any more. That was the kicker for Crash mode really – it was that mode where your non-gamer friends could actually play against you and have fun. Showtime instead makes it “Crash anywhere, anytime” which is sort of cool, but equates to boredom after a small amount of time – once you crash you just have to tap X to keep your car bouncing into other cars, and you can seriously keep bouncing for minutes without stopping.

Let’s look at how you play the single player game of Burnout Paradise. You start in a junkyard with only one car to your name. It’s not a bad car, so you pick your favourite mode. You remember Crash is no longer there, go with you’re “second favourite”, Road Rage – and learn how to navigate the city using the map. You’re doing quite well, you find two challenges and complete them, earning you a new car and a new licence. The game resets those two Road Rage challenges and you move onto the next licence.

Skip forward two licences. You’ve just come to the realisation that if you continue to play through this game, by the time you reach the last licence you will have done those two challenges six times each. And because Road Rages can go anywhere, but to get the best score you need to survive for as long as you can, you’ll find that you’re mapping similar routes for each one – you’re making sure they all pass the auto-repairs so you can repair damage. Basically: the same track with different starting points.

At this point the game is pretty easy, so you haven't failed a challenge yet. You realise if you just keep doing your favourite challenges you will have exhausted them by the time you get to the end, so you try a Burning Route. Burning Routes are time trial races – if you win them you upgrade your car. You start the burning route, and it’s tough... too tough. You fall short of the finish line by 5 seconds. There’s no reset button, so you’ve no choice but to drive all the way back. And if you fail again? This time by 1 second? Tough, it's time to drive right back to the start. It gets to the point where you just turn around and drive back to the start if you mess up a single corner or crash – that way you can minimise the distance you have to drive back. It’s kind of like being a pizza delivery driver with a faulty short term memory.

I'd like to move on to what’s right with this game but before I do, EA, if you insist on putting the worst music and colour commentary into your games do the world a favour and default all sound options to OFF. Leave in sound effects but save us all the hassle of going in to the menu and turning off Avril Lavigne’s hit racing song “Girlfriend”. And if you’re going to mask your loading times with an introduction to the event your loading try mixing it up a little. I actually understood the objective of a race after the first time you told me – when we hit loading screen 90, all I want to do is punch DJ Atomika.

It may sound like I’m spitting hate at this game, but it’s not a complete failure. Burnout Paradise is without question the best looking car game on the market to date. And I can see it having the best crash physics model for a very, very long time. The sense of speed is phenomenal, and the driving model complements it perfectly – with enough skill you can drive for ages without hitting a single thing, boosting through crashes and weaving through oncoming traffic until your mobile rings and you glance at it – for a split second – and your car crunches into a wall, going from sedan to SMART car in a matter of seconds. No game compares to it.

Unfortunately, the good parts about this game only serve to make the rest of this game an even greater disappointment. Normally when we get a sequel for a great series the problems come in that there isn’t enough innovation… This time the innovation is everything that is wrong with the game.

Developers need to understand that games don’t need to be free form open world extravaganzas to be good. Even if most of the issues I had with this game were fixed to make the open world model work, I still don’t believe it would be as good as a simple menu based system - it would still lack the arcadey, party game atmosphere that made the previous instalments so good.

Remember: -this is just the single player portion of this game – maybe multiplayer can change everything we’ve seen in the game so far. It kind of has to.