Review: Burnout Paradise

I'm sitting quietly in my car. Outside the windows the world soars by. Suddenly my world is filled with the light of flying sparks, and the sound of metal twisting fills the air. A small car has ended my giant speed and my car has now been reduced to a burning wreck. Welcome to paradise city, the city of speed and spectacular crashes.


I have always been a bit of a fan of the Burnout series and its very direct approach to entertainment. Combining super fast car races, getting rewarded for destroying your opponents and seeing cars break into tiny bits in slow-motion has always been a winning formula in my book. The Last few years however have been a bit disapointing, with new Burnout titles being little more than re-releases of the popular Bournout 3. Bournout Paradise attempts to change that. The question is whether it is still able to maintain the Burnout soul from the prior games.

The first thing you will notice about Burnout Paradise is its new feature: The city. Where earlier installments used a simple menu system, this game is heavily based on free roaming in a big city. This is not really a new concept, but i have rarely seen a racing-game city that was quite as interesting as burnouts "Paradise city". It really has everything you could ask for: Busy city streets, mountains with hairpin-turns, a lot of interesting locations and a lot of exploration potential.
There is one big problem though: An open world doesn't compliment the ultrafast gameplay of burnout very well, and having to read maps is not generally what i associate with having fun. This problem however is swiftly forgotten, because this game does so many things right. When I drift through a corner using the smooth arcade controls and activate your boost this game comes very close to my videogame heaven. On top of that the amount of different event types has been improved, insuring that you rarely feel like you are just "grinding" to earn the next reward.

Another factor that really helps burnout is (and has always been) the technology behind. This game looks stunning. The light effects, and detail level of your cars and the city is constantly high, and the speeds you are able to obtain while the game engine renders this is incredible. I cant remember being able to drive this fast in any game before. The soundtrack and sound-effects are also very competent, with a lot of good music and some very realistic sound of metal twisting. There is a lot of recycling from especially the PSP versions of Burnout in the song department, and Criterions own songs are poor, but both of these problems can be removed by using the "skip song" button, and if you are anything like me you will quickly get a few favorites.

All in all i would definitely recommend Burnout Paradise to any fans of car-games out there. The map-reading pollutes the pure arcade experience a bit, but this game easily makes up for it by being very competent in all other areas, and it ends up being both very good entertainment and an improvement over its predecessors.

Story: None Gameplay: 9/10 sound: 8/10 graphics: 9/10

Overall: 9/10

Info:
Developer: Criterion
Publisher: EA
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, PC