Burnout Paradise – 360 Review

Burnout Paradise – 360 Review:

This is the highly anticipated update to one of the most popular racing franchises in console history. Burnout has always been about painfully fast speeds and bone crushing crashes. Burnout Paradise stays true to this while re-inventing what was becoming a rather stale franchise.

This is the second outing for Burnout on a next get console, but unlike its predecessor Burnout: Revenge, Paradise is the first true next-gen title for the series. The most exciting and also controversial aspect is that Paradise City (the game world) is one giant and open sandbox area. Much like the streets of Liberty City or Test Drive: Unlimited. Essentially the aim is to “free burn” around the city exploring, racing, crashing and just simply having a good time all as a means to build up your drivers license rank and win cars.

The license is a replacement for the star system in previous versions of the game. Each event you win adds a point on your license. Once you meet the point’s requirement for each class you progress, being rewarded with a new car and a reset of all events. At set intervals as you progress throughout a class other burnout “drivers” will enter the city. These AI cars are new to the area and it is your job to find them and take them down, in doing so you are rewarded with their car becoming unlocked in the junk yard (essentially your garage).

Events are a key part to progression in Paradise. They are reasonably simple to find and enter. Once you discover an event it is recorded in your map so you can easily find it later. There are 5 types of events, these include Race (A standard race), Road Rage (Crash a target number of other racers off the road), Marked Man (Get to the finish line before you get taken down), Stunt (Perform stunts and combo them to earn points) and Burning Route (Get to the finish line with a specific car within the time limit). To start an event pull up to any one of the 120 traffic lights, pop a burnout and away you go. You must win an event to progress with your license, lose and you have to drive back to the traffic light you started at and try again. No restart feature here. It all sounds bad, but with so many events and so much to do you just drive away and do something else. The only time this was a slight concern for me was around the ranch area of the city where there is a lack of events, but in all honestly it wasn’t an issue at all.

There is so much to do in this game. The Crash mode of the old games is now known as Showtime. At anytime you can enter this mode and smash into everything earning points along the way, great for some mindless fun. Each street allows you to set a Showtime high score, allowing you to beat your own or online scores. Every street also has a hot route event going from one end to the other beat your best or the best online time. Finally there are Burnout signs, Gates and Super Jumps all to be found throughout Paradise.

All this can be done with your friends via the seamless online mode. Press the right button and you can jump straight into an online Paradise game with your friends. It doesn’t drop a beat either. Playing with 1 or 8 other people there are different online only challenges ranging from easy to the extremely hard. It is good fun watching 8 cars working together to complete a challenge. You can also race each other all over the city. Another quirky feature of online mode is the camera, if you have an Xbox Cam the game will take a snap of you each time you are taken out and send it to the player who did so and vise versa. Pretty neat.

There are a few flaws with the game. Burning Routes are specific to a car this means driving back and forth between Junk Yards to switch cars, this can be a little tedious and later in the game makes you resent Burning Routes. The compass can make navigating from point A to B annoying. In a race is totally up to you where to go. The compass provides some direction on the best streets to turn to reach your goal, however it is not always obvious and you can easily miss where you are supposed to turn. Late in the game things can get slightly repetitive, you essentially do the same events over and over until you reach your elite license. The difficulty increases with each class upgrade, this helps to keep you somewhat interested.

Overall Burnout: Paradise is a fun solid experience. The changes generally work well to provide a fun and very familiar Burnout experience. The environment may have changed but the series hasn’t lost touch, it’s just gotten better. This is what a next-gen sequel should be like.

9/10