Game Review: Burnout Paradise

Developer: Criterion Games
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Console: Xbox 360/PC/PS3
Release Date: January 2008

The Good
Paradise City is gorgeous. Plenty of traffic, building variety, a lake, sea shore, country side, and countless off-road shortcuts.

No loading while driving around. Paradise City is huge, and as you’re driving to a new area the game loads without you ever noticing it, except for a little icon at the top left corner. There is loading before and after each event, but it’s not terrible.

Marked Man events. You must go from point A to point B, but there will be 3 or 4 black cars out to get you. They will try to make you crash enough times to the point where your car won’t be able to race, and you will lose. These guys mean business.

Road Rage, my favorite event, is back. Opponents seem a little easier to take down this time around, but as you get new licenses the takedown score to beat becomes pretty high.

Online races are a lot of fun. You can also complete online-only challenges with friends, like meeting inside a baseball stadium, jumping together from the same ramp, or making teams to take down opponents.

Located all over Paradise City are breakable billboards, hidden shortcuts marked by yellow fences, junkers, repair shops, gas stations, paint shops, parking areas and super jump ramps that you must find to unlock achievements. I’m having a lot of fun searching for these.

Sound effects are sharp and crystal clear as expected. Tires screeching, glass shattering, engines revving, metal twisting, etc. The in-game Dolby Digital 5.1 never gets old.



The Bad
No offline multiplayer, not even 2-player split-screen.

Events can’t be restarted. That means that if you mess up an event, like a 3 minute race, you have to reach the finish line for the event to end, and if you’d like to retry it you have to drive back to the starting point. This is incredibly annoying.

DJ Atomika, the announcer, just won’t shut up. He says the most obvious and idiotic things, like, “try not to crash” and “use boost to go faster.” I don’t think a single gamer likes him.

Stunt Runs are a bit on the lame side. You are given a limited amount of time to reach a high score by completing stunts, like clearing super jumps, performing barrel rolls or breaking billboards. It’s not terrible, but it becomes dull and repetitive quick.

You can no longer pass an event by finishing on 3rd place. You don’t even win medals anymore. Either you finish 1st, or you don’t finish at all.

No crash mode. Every Burnout has had a crash mode. What the hell was Criterion Games thinking? There’s a Showtime mode where you crash and your car starts tumbling down the road as you try to hit as many cars as possible, but it is not nearly as fun as the previous crash modes. Lame!

The music selection, while not bad, is not as cool as I had hoped. My favorite one is “Paradise City” performed by Guns N’ Roses.

Cars are still driven by ghosts. Is it too hard to put some freaking drivers inside the cars?

In Burnout Revenge you could steer your wrecked car after a crash and slam into opponents for an after-touch takedown. Not any more. Another problem with takedowns is that if you perform a takedown on a car and that one makes other cars crash, you’ll only get 1 takedown point, unlike before where you could get as many takedowns as there were opponents.

There are no weather changes. It’s always daytime, with clear skies. It’s a gorgeous-looking city, but come on, not even a single drop of rain or nighttime? Lazy programmers.

Burnout Revenge introduced the Crashbreaker Race, where you could make your car explode after crashing to take some of your opponents with you. This is gone, sadly.

For whatever reason the Burnout series has never featured licensed cars, so every vehicle looks somewhat similar to real cars, but aren’t.

Car-checking is no longer allowed, so if you hit a car from behind you will wreck your car.



Bottom Line
If you’re new to the Burnout series you’ll love Paradise, but fans of Revenge will miss many features that are inexplicably absent. Also, if you’re not planning to go online, forget about playing locally with your friends. Still, there’s plenty to do in Paradise City to keep you pushing the pedal to the metal for a long time.