Paradise is an interesting, albeit questionably executed concept that needs a little tuning before the next race.
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: EA Criterion
Genre: Racing
Platform: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
Rating Everyone 10+
Score: 7/10
Graphics: 8/10
Audio: 8/10
Gameplay: 6/10
Technical: 9/10
Packaging: 6/10
Note: The author of this review does not play non-MMO games online. This review is written based only on the single-player components of this title.
Graphics
Artistically, Burnout Paradise uses a lot of surreal tones and a very washed out palette. While it's still easy to tell colors apart from one another, the designers have decided to display the game in a way that makes it look more like a mid-90s racing flick or a home movie rather than a modern day drift/racing picture. This is confusing as most of the gameplay reminds one of Fast and the Furious rather than something that we would have seen in 1995. The game makes heavy use of bloom and HDR effects to give the impression that you're racing in a dream rather than real-life, which was a great choice given the very fanciful nature of the game's crashes. Car designs are wide ranging and well-designed, so there's a lot of variety in what you race and you'll most likely never be turned off by the set of wheels you're cruising around in. As for the world around you, there's a lot of variety in what's available. You'll drive through a bustling downtown area with lots of shining glass, a harbor area where the water front is just in sight, mountainous roads with lots of pine trees and dirt, a full fledged dam, and an area around a small country town just outside city limits.
Audio
Like the graphical presentation, the game tries to sound surreal in its audio presentation as well. There's lots of low and loud tones, and heavy use of bass throughout. Driving under bulkheads of large bridges will get you a very deep "thwoosh" sound from your subwoofer (as will your initial entrance into a tunnel) and rear speakers - incredibly deeper than you might hear in real life. The actual car crashes themselves will put out much louder audio than the rest of the game, probably to highlight them as the star of the show. Finally, the audio seems designed to be played along with some loud music, so a personal recommendation is to create a driving or "Burnout" playlist to jam along to as your ride through Paradise City.
Gameplay
The main pillar of Burnout Paradise' gameplay is that each intersection in the game houses a different event. The five event types are: Road Rage, in which the objective is to takedown a certain number of drivers before the time runs out or they total your vehicle; Race, which is pretty self explanatory; Marked Man, in which the objective is to go from point A to point B while every other driver on the road attempts to total your vehicle; Stunt Run, in which the objective is to complete as many stunts as possible in the time limit provided to meet a score limit; and Burning Route, in which the objective it to get from point A to point B in a certain amount of time. Winning an event will get you a mark on your license (and possibly unlock a new vehicles, which you have to find driving around and total before you can add it to your garage) and your license will be upgraded once you get a certain number of marks. At each upgrade, your event map will be cleared and you'll have to get a higher amount of marks to move to the next level. The five events aren't very different each other, which can cause them to become more of a chore rather than a challenge after awhile, which isn't helped along by the fact that the game is a tad on the easy side to begin with. This also isn't helped by the fact that the game employs heavy use of "catch up" AI. In fact, in some of the event types the game will purposely spawn opposing cars in front of your position should you get too far ahead of the ones that you've already defeated.
Essentially, there are three points where the single-player portion of Burnout Paradise shines. First is the fact that you can essentially drive around the entire map for the fun of it and do whatever you want to. This alone can eat up hours of your time and if you really get sucked in you'll spend more time doing this than ou will actually completely the events. There's three different sets of items to find while exploring: there's smashable gates which reveal shortcuts and other goodies; Burnout billboards that you can smash through; and finally there are super jumps to master. Memorizing these findable places are the key to winning the Stunt Run events. The second shining star of Burnout Paradise is the Showtime Mode. Showtime mode can basically be described as turning your car into a bouncing ball and you trying to bounce it into as many other moving vehicles as possible. When you enter Showtime Mode, the game let your car loose bouncing - if your car stops bouncing heavily, you can use your boost meter to make it start bouncing again and you can gain more boost by smashing in to cars. The game will also place more cars on the street than it would when you're just driving around normally, so you'll most of the time be able to keep your car bouncing and smashing for a good four or five minutes before you run out of boost. Finally, there's the Road Rage event. The objective as mentioned above is to meet the takedown target before time runs out or your vehicle is totaled. You score a takedown in Burnout when you directly cause an opposing vehicle to wreck. You can do this multiple ways - causing them to smash into a wall, another vehicle, grinding them against a median, or even t-boning them. You get totaled if they take you down too many times or you wreck too many times. Road Rage is simply non-stop chaos and you have all of the city to make it happen.
Other than the events and unlockables, there are drive-thrus scattered all throughout the city. Driving through a repair shops will repaid all damage to your vehicle, driving through a gas station will max out your boost meter, and driving through a paint shop will give your car a random new look.
Technical
Burnout Paradise framerate is smooth without, especially given the number of car pieces that can be flying around at any given time. When you crash your car, hundreds of pieces of metal and glass will fly about and the car frame will deform and bend realistically. The game has what appear to be accurate physics. Load times are short and the game uses a streaming technology that for the most part is completely transparent. Finally, the game's online features are completely seamless and appear to be fast and reliable.
Packaging
The packaging for Burnout Paradise is at first glance of high quality, but once you open the case all of that comes unraveled. The manual is only ten pages long and not in color, so it doesn't both explaining the color-coded nature of the event icons. The manual papaer itself is lightweight and flimsy, easily markable and tearable. The game case itself feels light and cheap given the lacking nature of the manual - there's no stiffness to keep the case from easily being bent. The car design on the cover is very artitistic, yet the binding artwork leaves a lot to be desired. The game logo on the binding is too small read easily from a distance and there is too much overall dead space in the area. The backing of the vase has a very spots of marketing