by Hyperion Ecta
The ability to go fast in 2+ tonnes of steel and carbon fiber has always amazed humans. The speed and momentum provides a rush that little else in the world can deliver. Now, to achieve such a rush you would have to step into your vehicle, which is most likely a standard one and try to achieve a high speed on the road, which is both highly dangerous and highly stupid. So how do you achieve such a rush, you ask? The best and most obvious answer is to hire out one of those race driving schools and go really fast around a track, but since that’s expensive the best alternative is this game, Burnout Paradise.
Burnout Paradise, is the fifth installment in the long running and successful racing series from the guys at Criterion Games. And while the previous installments were built on high speed crashes and races….well, this is much the same, but Paradise is a completely open-world based in ‘Paradise City’ which instead of events being reached by menu’s, the events are spread across the city and allows you to find them all by exploring the area, which is comprised of 5 major areas; Palm Bay Heights which takes on a beach theme; Downtown which is your metro area; Harbor Town which is your dock area; Silver Lake which is the northern mountain ranges and lastly White Mountain which is the westernmost part of the city. These five areas are quite large in size and packed with events to do but in saying that, it’ll take you only 3 or so minutes to traverse the city from one end to the other. Another problem is that the western side of city is really not adorned with enough events once again adding to the tedium of driving to events far away.
The events take on 5 varieties, your basic Races; Road Rages which involve you crashing as many competing vehicles as you can within the time limit; Marked man which requires you to survive a point-to-point journey while being pursued by drivers in black cars hellbent on taking you down; Stunt Runs which needs the player to reach a points total in a set time limit by performing stunts like barrel rolls and flat spins over large jumps littered around the city; Burning Routes which is a time trial with a new car you’ve unlocked. Some of these events require you to reach a certain destination of which there are 6. One for each area point of the compass. For example, there’s a country club to the north, a dock to the south, a wind farm to the west, etc, etc.
The events are entered by finding them in the city at the junctions of roads. You just drive up and pull both the right and left triggers to start the event. While this is a real innovative feature it also has a major flaw. If you fail the event you must drive all the way back to the event junction to retry the event. While this is not a big problem early on in the game as you can do something else in the event packed city but once you get toward the end of the game you find yourself driving quite a long way back to try the event again which is very tedious.
The cars which are the showpiece of most racing games sort of take a back seat to the high speed crashes but in saying that are much better than in previous installments. This time around they are split into fictional manufacturer’s such as Hunter and Krieger. This gives personality to the cars your driving instead of your normal pick-up, SUV and muscle car skins they used to have. The cars are well designed even down to the badges on the back of the vehicles which you wouldn’t really expect from this game. There are 75 vehicles in this game but in actuality there’s 30 0r so proper different cars then upgraded versions of each car which have a new paint job or something of the that ilk.
One of the mainstays of the Burnout series has been boosting and crashes. Boosting takes on it’s usual major feature of the gameplay with three varieties that are specific to each class. Speed class have small boosts bars but can be filled up quickly by going fast and driving on the wrong side of the road allowing you to chain boosts together; Aggressive cars have a large boost bar but it must be built by crashing other people’s cars and obviously being aggressive and the last class is Stunt which also has a large boost bar which is filled by doing stunts, the major difference with that class is you can use the boost at any time. The crashes on the other hand take a back seat to previous installments. It’s now called ‘Showtime’ and can be activated anytime and anywhere but due to the lack of set pieces it feels less polished and not as refined as in the previous games.
Online play takes a large role in this game as you can easily get online and join parties of other players and go around completing events or complete challenges. The online features are well implemented and fun to play especially as you can cruise around with friends and perform stunts and outdo each other. The other major component of online play is ‘Road Rules’. These are times and showtime scores that are attributed to each road in the city that you can set online and your friends can try to beat your scores.
The visuals are breathtaking, to put it simply. The cars look fantastic and the city looks picturesque. The city is designed quite well and the areas have their only flavour to them. The framerate is strong and doesn’t flutter and the load times are fantastic as there’s only one at the start of each play and surprisingly is quite quick. But by far the most visually awesome thing in the game is the crashes which look incredibly real, enough so that at times you can’t help but look at them with awe. On the other side of the coin, we have sound. While the atmosphere sounds brilliant and cars each have their own sound which also sound fantastic the DJ who leads you through the game’s basics is brain-numbingly annoying.
The longevity of the game is quite good, there’s 120 events to find and do…some more than once as well as plenty of billboards to smash, shortcuts to take and jumps to fly headfirst off. Even driving around for is fun enough to spend a few hours. The online features add to this taking the game to a very solid 30+ hours of gameplay.
Burnout Paradise is a fantastic racing game that has continued the tradition of great Burnout games while adding the new innovative features to the mix. It looks stunning and plays great. It really is the next best thing to achieving the rush of speed and momentum that we all enjoy so much.
Visuals – 9/10
Sound – 8.5/10
Gameplay – 9/10
Longevity – 9/10
Overall – 9/10
Very nice review Shane, very nice.
I however don’t agree with it. I started playing Paradise and thought the same way as you, it was fun and innovative. But once the sheen of a new game wore off and I looked ‘under the hood’ the mechanics and gameplay are very repetitive and tedious. First of all, I don’t think the free-roaming city works very well. When your driving around the city feels empty, despite the other cars on the road there is nothing happening in the city. If we are meant to believe that the city has a culture of Burnout racing should we not see other cars doing events as we drive around?
Another thing, the event types. There arn’t enough to keep up interest. They are fun but boring at the same time. Races get tedious and stunt runs are hard to do with no indicators of where the stunts are.
And one last thing (as I’m not writing a review here :p ) but the game is too fast for its own good. This may seem like a weird thing to say for a Burnout game, but when your speeding through the city in a race it is far to easy to miss a corner and go from first to last place in a split-second. And while the crash animations are fantastically designed, when you crash on average once every four-five mintues you really should be able to skip them.
The emptiness of the city is true, I can’t deny, that but the other points…
Event wise, it’s the same with every racing game, they always have events that can bore you after repeated playthroughs, and yes Stunt Run is hard but you just gotta learn the area and know where the stunts are.
And on the last point…I never really had that problem.
Thanks for the awesome comment though.
Nice review, I agree with most of it. In response to Dimorphic’s comment (and something you didn’t mention in the review) about how the city is too quiet… The way in which you acquire new cars is, I think, an amazingly fun feature. The fact that some aren’t added immediately to your garage but will suddenly be romaing around the city and require taking down to add to your collection is great!
At first I went out hunting as soon as a new car was available and took it out ASAP, however I decided to experiment with not going after any of them and letting the numbers build… This makes driving around the city far more exciting when you’re suddenly ambushed by 3 burnout racers and end up in “to the death” game of cat and mouse.
I agree with the point about how annoying it is driving back to the start of events. There should be a “retry” option if you fail. I often find myself quitting an event quite early on if I’m not doing well and driving back to the start from a lesser distance.
Anyway, great review! Sorry to ramble on there!
Great comment mate, I wish we had more people that commented like you.
Cheers buddy! Just had another thought… events you’ve completed should be ticked off the map. Really annoying when you can’t tell from the menu what you’ve already done!
Keep up the reviews!
I thought that events were ticked off when you’ve completed them?
When you get to an event location, there is a scrolling mssg along the bottom of the screen that tells you if you have already done this one or not without having to actually enter the event.
Yeah events are ticked off on the map. If you have SD tv then it’s damn hard to see. I have one and need to squint to see if they’re ticked. I guess I wll use the slow method of scrolling text down the bottom