It's a bit difficult to explain the feelings that the Burnout games produce. The best way I think I can illustrate them for you is for you to take a few deep breaths, and then hold your breath while reading this review... Please stop if you feel faint, but otherwise... 3... 2... 1... GO!
Burnout Paradise is the latest in the line of Burnout games, in which you race ridiculously fast through traffic filled streets against opponents whom it's highly encouraged to ram off the road. When you do 'Takedown' someone you get to see some spectacular and incredibly detailed crashes, which are even more detailed when you crash yourself. Your car is quick on its own, but by the aforementioned taking down of opponents or by performing stunts (jumps, drifts, passing near to cars and driving into oncoming traffic) you can also earn a boost which can make you go brain-meltingly fast.
'Paradise' differs from previous Burnout games because rather than on an A to B route or a circuit, the game is played in an open world. There's no set progression in the game's events – you just drive around and when you get to one of the many junctions you can choose to activate the event there, or you can just continue to drive around finding all the jumps and shortcuts in the huge environment. Events can be races (race others to a set point), 'Stunt Runs' (do lots of stunts), 'Marked Man' events (get to a point without getting wrecked by the other cars) or 'Road Rage' events (take down a number of cars). Win events and new cars will appear driving around Paradise, take them down and they're yours to drive. Then you can also do the special 'Burning Route' event for that car and earn an upgrade for it. There’s a nice mix of exotics, muscle cars, hotrods and SUVs and they come in three classes; stunt, speed and aggression. There are over 70 to find and unlock so everyone should find one they like the look & feel of.
So you can go really fast, the game looks great, and it's super-smooth too – there aren't any graphical hitches or glitches that I've seen so far. But I have two gripes. First of all, many people's favourite part of previous Burnout games has gone – ‘Crash mode’. Instead you can initiate a big slo-mo crash whenever you want and guide your wreck around to try to rack up a huge score, but it's not the same puzzle-type fun. Secondly, the game eventually makes you go too fast. Like you holding your breath now, you'll eventually hit a point where you stop finding the game amusing and just have to continually nail your boost and pray you don't hit anything. You can't just hit 'retry' on the races (you have to drive back to the start, or just pick another race near where you finished), which makes learning the route for a particular race rather hard, and more of a chore if you had a ‘retry race?’ option. If you hit this point and you get frustrated, step away from the game for a few hours, and when you come back just try driving a bit more safely, only boosting when in the clear – I found this helped.
The good news is that if it does get too much in the single player, the free-roaming nature of the game really opens things up for multiplayer games – a few pushes of the D-Pad has you (almost) seamlessly transferred to online mode and lets you invite friends in, where you can race each other or take on some of the co-op challenges, where everyone needs to complete certain stunts together. These are all good fun, but unless you have a good list of friends it might be tricky to complete the ones requiring more players, as not many people seem to want to join a random room that's open to the public. There's a lot of other innovation in the online that I don't have space for here, but suffice to say if you want to be online and have some arcade racing fun then this is The Daddy right now.
Burnout Paradise is a worthy entry in the Burnout series of games – there's plenty of innovation here that other games should be looking to for inspiration, although the disappearance of crash mode is a concern for me. Overall the game is the best arcade/action racing experience so far in this generation of consoles, and everyone would do well to consider it for their games collection. Also, if you've held your breath this far then well done, I think you should have experienced some of the mild panic that you get in every tight Burnout race.
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