Burnout Paradise is a huge change for the franchise, not to mention a great one at that.
The game takes place in Paradise City (yeah yeah Guns n' Roses blah blah blah blah): it is completely open-world, and you can drive anywhere at anytime. There are no loading screens, and no menus to jump through aside from the title screen. This new design works really well, and never takes you away from the action that Burnout is known for. The city looks pretty outstanding. It has everything from a packed skyscraper-filled downtown, to beautifully natural mountain countryside. For the most part, all of the buildings are different and unique looking: you'll notice specifically named hotels, a movie theater, and restaurants. There is a decent amount of detail in the textures and various objects lying around as well. The best part is that you can break apart a lot of stuff. There are plenty of lampposts to knock down, fences to break, and billboards to crash through. It's tons of fun to zoom around the city, and discover the vast number of jumps and shortcuts. On top of looking great and having no load times, the game has virtually no glitches or frame rate issues, even at high speeds.
In addition to looking great, the game's sound is brilliant. This does not include the soundtrack or the voice of the radio DJ heard throughout the game, because they both SUCK. Thankfully you can turn off the DJ, and adjust the game to play the few songs that are actually worth listening to. Moving on to the good stuff – the engines roar and sound very powerful. In general, the cars have their own roar: muscle cars make deep gassy noise, and racecars make smooth flowing high-pitched revs. The tires screech in practically perfect tone, which varies quite well with speed. Metal to metal clanking and scraping, either with the guardrail or an opponent, sounds great, and the scratched paint and dented fenders are just as good. The wind howls and booms as you rush past traffic while boosting, which greatly adds to Burnout's unmatched sense of speed.
With virtually limitless freedom and a massive open-world city, is this still a Burnout game through and through? Most definitely. The game is the same chaotic thrill ride as it's always been; in some ways, even more than before. With a huge open city to drive around in, the door is wide open for you to cause absolute mayhem at anytime you please. Crashes are flat-out ridiculous and awesome. The game slows down time right when you bash into something, and allows you to watch you car twist, bend, and break with absolute precision. The game then suddenly switches back to real-time, and you then witness your car flying through the air or barrel-rolling down the road for 500 yards. Not every crash forces you to re-spawn, however. In some cases, you'll be able to continue driving your hunk-a-junk after it's been bent 50 times the wrong way. This is called a "driveaway" – there's a creative name for it.
Of course, in a Burnout game, what are epic crashes without epic takedowns? Luckily, the takedowns are just as cool looking and satisfying as they've always been. It is simply so awesome to watch a rival racer go head first into a wall, or spinning off of a ramp after you've slammed into his side or rear.
A pretty big let down though, is the lack of after-touch in Burnout Paradise, but at least this allows the game to focus more on the action and remain really fast-paced. Traffic checking is missing as well, though that wasn't a very strong aspect of Revenge anyway. Possibly the biggest thing missing is crash mode, which has been replaced with showtime mode. Actually showtime is tons of fun on its own, though the pile-ups aren't as ridiculous looking. Basically you hit both bumpers at anytime while you're driving, and you car flips into the air. The whole point is to hit the A button to bounce your car and then steer it into traffic to cause as many crashes as possible. Steering can be somewhat tiring and hard to do, but as long as you have boost you can keep crashing forever. You gain boost by hitting cars, and you lose it when you hit the A button. If you hit a bus, you boost is refilled completely, and you get a score multiplier. In addition, the number of miles you travel during showtime is added to your score before the multipliers are factored in. While it may not be as explosive as crash mode, it is plenty of fun, and its interesting to see just how far you can travel before your boost runs out.
There are some new event modes that can be quite entertaining, but take a little time to get used to. In addition to the immensely fun race and road rage events, there are stunt runs, marked man chases, and burning routes. The different events make for different car classes: speed, stunt, and aggression. Stunt runs are just what they sound like – you drive around the city looking for jumps, drift opportunities, and billboards. Obviously the "stunt" cars work best for this. The time runs out quickly, but you can go as long as you want if you're boosting. Doing the various stunts adds to your boost bar, and the run's over when it depletes. This may sound cool and fun to do, but it's sometimes a bit of a chore. The city is hard to learn, and stringing runs together isn't always that easy. In marked man events, a bunch of other racers –always black cars for some reason – track you down and try to take you out. Based on the strength of the car you drive, there are a certain number of takedowns you can withstand before the chase is over – aggression has the most strength, and speed has the least. These events can get intense, and you'll be constantly fighting to take down as many cars as possible. Finally, the burning routes are sort of the replacements to burning laps seen before. You go from point A to point B in as little time as possible. What's different though is that completing a route with a car unlocks a different version of that same car. Each car has its own set route. This version may have more boost, or strength, etc. The routes do offer a decent challenge, though sometimes the traffic can become a nuisance.
If you don't want to do an event then there's tons of other fun stuff to do as well. As mentioned before, there are Burnout billboards scatter all around the city. Finding all of these and smashing through them is part of the game, and awards you with an achievement. The boards are always reached by way of a jump or shortcut; some of which are immensely thrilling to drive through. There are also 300 yellow gates to be smashed through, which also open up some awesome shortcuts and jumps. Speaking of jumps, there are "super jumps" to find as well. These jumps are in some ridiculous locations, and a number of them are just plain massive. If you really don't feel like doing anything, simply driving around the city is fun as well. Just driving around will also help you to learn the city's complex layout and shortcuts. There are also three hidden off-road stunt areas to discover, but while they'll hold your interest for a while, they're actually kind of simplistic and boring.
All this yapping about the game and I still haven't talked about its superb online play. As I said before, there's no break in the action, even when hopping online. You don't go into a menu or lobby and wait for a half hour. Instead you either enter a different Paradise hosted by another player, or host your own. You don't have to start an event while online. The game remains open-world, and you can just drive around with the other players. When hosting, you can set your own race settings, including start and end points, or begin a challenge. These challenges are often creative and fun. The problem is that they can be very hard to complete. They range from needing two players to eight players, and there are 50 for each amount. Thus getting to do them all is very difficult unless you have a large number of friends to play with consistently. A pretty awesome feature to the online is that it supports the Xbox Live Vision Camera. This allows you to post a picture of yourself for your profile, as well as take mug shots of your opponents. Basically when you take down a rival player, the camera takes a picture of that person's reaction – yeah pretty awesome.
Burnout Paradise is certainly an amazing game, but the new open world design comes with a few problems. When I say the city is huge, I mean it's HUGE. There are 250 miles of road, and that doesn't include the shortcuts which may double that number. You aren't really given any useful tutorial or advice throughout the game other than the explanations of the events. The events are located at the intersections in the game, and there are A LOT of intersections. The open world gameplay extends to the events. There is no direct route you have to take; you go any way that you want. While this sounds like an awesome idea, you probably won't have a good idea of where to go, and you might end up getting lost. Some of the races are over long stretches, and these events are open to you right from the start. You don't know the destination of the event until you start it, and there is no way to restart if you mess up. You can only quit out by stopping completely for a few seconds. The game tries to help you by giving you a line, representing a compass, at the top of your screen, a mini map in the corner, and a map of the entire city with the press of the back button. However, these could've been a lot more useful. The compass is nearly impossible to use because it just doesn't make enough sense. The mini map is way too small and blurry to read clearly. The city map works the best, but you'll need to pause the race in order to view it, and you'll have to do this often throughout the game. Even this map has problems. The zoom is either too close or too far, and planning your route takes more time than it should. In addition to the city being rather overwhelming, the game gets repetitive. The races, routes, and marked man events are between eight different destinations. Since there are so many events, you'll be going to the same end locations over and over again. You'll even be repeating the same events at the same intersections. It's also probably worth noting that there is no speedometer, or driver in the car throughout the game.
Despite some difficulty, any person will have tons of fun playing burnout paradise. The game gives you a rush, and is more thrilling than any other racing game. The game is also very long. It took me almost 100 hours to get 100% completion, and that's without the online play. Even though the game is repetitive, each race is a little different, and smashing rivals into barriers and traffic never gets old. There's a lot of stuff to do, and you'll have fun doing it all. Throw in an outstanding presentation, engaging online play, and pure destruction, and you have an excellent racing game that anyone should try.
I think that if Criterion makes the next Burnout an open-world/sequel to Paradise, it will be one of the greatest racers ever because they'll be able to fix the problems that hindered this one.