Its no realitsic racing sim, far from it, but it is quite possibly the best arcade style racer on the market.
In Paradise City, a sunny locale with an ocean-front, baseball stadium, windmills, mountain line and many other sub-sections, it serves as your automobile playground. Paradise takes place in some odd parallel universe populated by phantom cars that do not need drivers in order to function. Then there's this DJ Atomica character who commands the radios in Paradise and chats the day away talking about other Burnout drivers doing flat spins and good spots for catching air. Vexing, yes; awkwardly hysterical, at times; useful, not really. You'll learn to ignore the well-intentioned DJ after a while; now if they swapped him out for the female tutorial guide voice actor from Burnout Revenge… I could listen to her voice all day no matter what she is saying.
Open world games come with many pros and cons, but none so as much as Paradise. It's a real joy to not have to navigate clunky menus to find events like in past Burnout games; instead you drive around freely and find events. To initiate an event just pull up to any intersection and hold down both triggers. Each intersection has one event and you can repeat the events once you get a higher license, more on this later. If you want to end the event simply stop your vehicle and it will automatically cancel the event. Sounds great right?
It is, most of the time. When it's a neck-to-neck battle for first place or you're nearly at the target score for a Stunt Run and you fail, there is no 'Retry' option. If you want to try again you must go all the way back to the intersection where the event initiates. This isn't really a problem early on as if you lose an event there will likely be a handful of events in close proximity to you, but later on it can be a little frustrating. Also events that you have completed are not marked or anything. So you may accidentally re-initiate already completed events, thankfully DJ Atomica tells you this and then you can just stop your car and cancel it, it's still rather annoying though.
Licenses upgrade at set intervals of numbers of wins. When it upgrades all events are basically 'reset'. So there's race A, you beat race A when you had a C license. You upgraded to a B license, you can now do race A and it will count as a win again. It takes about 70 or so wins to go from D cIass to A cIass licenses, and there are 120 events in total in Paradise. In fact when I got my A license (which isn't even the highest license) I had already clocked in over 12 hours of play. As you can see, Paradise will last you a long time, and even longer for completionists. With my A license I was only at 38% complete; collecting every car, smashing every gate, destroying each billboard and finding all the super-jumps will keep you busy for a long time.
There are only five types of events in Paradise, but each caters to certain driving skills and need a unique approach. Races are standard… well, races. You have to beat other drivers to the finish line, and the number of racers can vary from six and eight to even just two. Burning Routes are car specific and are essentially solo time-trials. Marked Man challenges require you to make it from one point to another without being taken down by other racers.
Road Rage, my personal favorite, is basically a game of high velocity bumper cars. You must takedown a certain number of cars and you have no time limits and no destination, just you, other drivers and Paradise City. Stunt Runs are timed sessions in which you must score as much points as possible. In order to score points you can do ramp jumps, barrel rolls, flat spins, and other such things, which are physically impossible in real life, but totally common actions in the Burnout universe.
Replacing the Crash mode from past Burnouts is the Showtime mode. At any time you can hit both bumpers and your car will became a bouncing chunk of shattering metal that will keep it's momentum as long as you keep crashing and smashing stuff. It's not as tight and, dare I say, strategic as Crash mode, where you had to plan a route and use plentiful 'aftertouch' to navigate your wreck for maximum wreckage, but it's fun and mindless, perfect if you don't feel like doing events and would rather get some instant action.
Unlike past Burnout games where selecting what car to use was needlessly confusing and it wasn't as simple as 'pick the one that's farthest to the right', Paradise keeps that second tradition intact but makes it much easier to decide what to drive. When you get a new car it won't always be better than all the ones you already have, but it will probably be better for certain events than others. Cars are given a tentative classification and a stat for 'speed', 'boost' and 'strength'.
Pick a car with high 'strength' for Road Rage and Marked Man events or for Stunt Runs cars with high 'boost' are usually your best bet for scoring high. Paradise makes it easy to choose a ride and car variety is high as well; I went with an antique 50's styIe pick-up truck for a while then switched to a Japanese street racer with sexy black tribal decals. Unfortunately there is no customization beyond changing the color of the car. But you'll be swapping paint jobs and shunting other racers so much your immaculately detailed recreation of your pet turtle Franky will be unrecognizable by the end.
The mini-map in the bottom right hand corner is a bit cluttered and messy. But it becomes manageable, eventually, and once you know the basic layout of Paradise City it'll serve as just a quick reminder of familiar routes and paths that you'll have by then memorized. I rarely even use it for constant navigational purposes now. I just take a quick glance at it to make sure I'm on the right pathway, there are landmarks that are easily distinguished that will help you find your way. For example, if I'm on the southern end I'll just make sure I'm following the red railroad line as that cuts right through that section.
Now online play in Paradise is plain awesome. Not only is it fun to freeburn with others, but it's so simple to setup. Just press right on the d-pad, and an in-game menu opens up where everything online related is laid out for you. It's idiot-proof and so easy to host, invite, find and join games. Paradises online mode is a good example of how to merge online seamlessly into a game.
While the overall design is adequately fluid, there is one thing that holds the game back… 'driveaways.' Sometimes when you crash, instead of getting totally wrecked, your car remains functional and you'll have to continue on. It's incredibly frustrating to be in the front of the pack, only to nick a SUV in an intersection and spin out, then instead of respawning as you would if you wrecked, you get a 'driveaway.' Then all the other racers zoom by as you try to get pack up to speed. Once I was literally like 10 meters from the finish line in a Burning Route, then I got a 'driveaway,' unfortunately my car tumbled over and was facing the wrong direction. By the time I backed up and re-orientated my vehicle I had ran out of time. It never reaches baby-punching levels of vexation, but it's irritating nonetheless.
Graphically Paradise is very nice. The environments are nicely detailed and feel full; spare tire piles at gas stations, random parked cars, Paradise City isn't just a bunch of roads. Cars gleam realistically in the light and they crumple real good during crashes. Metal bends, windows blow out and debris scatters every which way; add in some slow-mo, dynamic camera angles and saturated washed-out color effects and you have a recipe for consistently beautiful crashes.
Maybe it was just me; but whenever I would crash by accident or by some stupid error the game would make it look like any banal mundane crash scene. But once I was on a total rampage in a Road Rage event and after a takedown the camera followed the car I just totaled. As it pirouetted down the street, with ample motion-blur effects, it was a true twirling hunk of metallic death, cars were whizzing by and shredded parts were flying willy-nilly… it looked and felt better than some Hollywood movie scenes.
Framerate is amazing as well, it's a blisteringly steady 60 frames per second and even with multiple racers taking down one another and vying for first place it doesn't meet any hiccups. Online performs swell and looks just as good as when you're playing by yourself as well. While the graphics are gorgeous, the same can't be said about the soundtrack. It's a rather odd mix of pop and rock that probably won't be very pleasing to a wide audience. I just plugged my .mp3 player into my 360 and played my tunes off that. Burnout Paradise does a stellar job with sound effects though; not surprisingly however as the past games in the series have all had superb whooshes and whizzes that ratchets up the sense of speed to that unparallel level that only Burnout games can achieve.
Burnout Paradise really boils down to whether or not you're looking for an arcade styIe racer filled with high-speed thrills. There aren't many other racing games in the same boat as Paradise and even if it was your only choice, it's still a great choice. Sure it has some irritating design choices and can be a little maddening at times, but it's still very fun. Although it lacks local multiplayer, playing by yourself is still enjoyable, so don't worry if you can't play online. Really though if you want an arcade styIe racer, you can't go wrong with Paradise.