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This must be just like living in Burnout Paradise

07th July 2009

Heart thumping, getting so close to the end of the race, if only you could get those three black cars off your tail that keep smashing you into the wall, then you can make it safe to the finish, unscathed. However it is unlikely that this environment will be forgiving enough for you to make it to the finish. This is Burnout Paradise, the fifth in a series of explosive racing games that pushes your reaction times to the limits but rewards you with spectacular crashes when you fail to make the grade.

Criterion Games gave the Burnout series a fresh new feel this time around. With an almost menu-less system for starting races and taking on challenges, the new open world dynamic brings a lot of new concepts and features to a series that is certainly middle aged. Previous iterations of the Burnout series were deep in menus to get into the action. With Burnout Revenge even having multiple levels of maps and menus to get through just to start a race off. No more! Burnout Paradise (aka BOP) takes a hint from the Midnight Club and Grand Theft Auto series and gets rid of the menus. All you are left with is a large island to explore. You are left to your own, with a basic car. It is up to you to actually find all the races on the map, which there is indeed an achievement for. Roll up on a race, hit both gas and brake, and you are good to go, the race starts, and you are off.

The world is instantly interesting. First off you have to repair your car, and then it’s off to exploring. I easily spent hours getting the lay of the land, trying out a few races, and finding those elusive gate smashes that are scattered throughout the city. Even when exploring, you can set top road rule times on all the roads, to the envy of your online friends (who can see them when they are crusing around). After you win a few races, you have the chance to take out special cars that add them to your collection. Tons of fun. The race types vary; from straight out end point races, to being the marked man, my favorite road rage, and so on.

Not only can you play these all offline, but with a quick flip of the D-pad pop-up menu, you can join an online party with other fellow racers. The online options include both racing in a couple different varieties, as well as a large handful of group challenges. These give the game extra breadth and depth after the single player game becomes too familiar.

Graphically and auditorially the game is amazing. True to form for a Burnout game, crashing looks awesome, with shards of your vehicle spinning off in all directions. Sounds boom and roar, with the life of the city all around. It is usually fairly easy to hear when a car is coming up behind you in surround. Ambient sounds also make you feel like you are in a city full of activity.

The game as it stood out of the box on release was impressive on its own. I personally put over 50 hours into the base game, with more than half of that online in Freeburns and Races. However over the course of the next year and a half, Criterion has gone to great lengths to contually add to this game. Iniitally, these updates were free. This first set of updates added in new online race types, and even a whole motorcycle subset of the game, which is a first for the Burnout series. Then later they added the option to buy exotic new cars, an offline pass-the-controller-party mode, and even a whole new section of map in the form of another island. Criterion has not only made this an excellent game, but also a platform. Using downloadable content packs and micro-transactions, they have extended the life of a game that likely would have lost interest after 6-8 months. However more than a year later, it goes on strong. I hope in the future, game developers and publishers take the hint from this success. Forget putting out another iteration of the same game every year, but how about adding the same functionality into the existing game as DLC? Here’s hoping for the future.