Burnout Paradise - 10/10
The Burnout series has come a long way since the original Burnout title. From races being timed at checkpoints to a massive open world all for your exploration - race anywhere, anytime. The Burnout series has been very successful in the racing genre and continues to bring us with quality games and this one really defines the racing game for both hardcore racers and casual racers.
The game starts off with you being issued a learners permit and a new wreck of a car. When you start driving you get to fix your car by driving through a repair shop. After it’s repaired and looks pretty sweet you get to enter an event! Only, you will have to drive around the city to find an event which really isn’t that hard as every intersection has an event on it. Once you enter an event or the first time you really put your foot down to get some speed you will notice how easy it is to crash and this may be the time you give up on the game. I know I almost did. You will be driving along and then all of a sudden a car will come out and hit you or you will smash into one of the many obstructions around Paradise City. Now there’s a fair learning curve with this game, not a hard one but a very stressful one. Be prepared to crash hundreds of times before becoming somewhat good. Luckily, the crashes are amazing. You will find yourself crashing on purpose to see the crash crumble up into a small ball of metal all in slow mo. You will awe as your car flips and leaves wheels and chunks of metal behind as it flies like an angel. In the early stages you will find yourself avoiding the events just to crash while you explore the vast area of Paradise City.
Paradise city is a huge, huge open area that you can explore. As you can see from the above picture, it’s big. Every intersection has a race on it. Well, I think I should stop calling them races because not all of them are in fact races. There’s a heap of game modes like Road Rage where you must crash your enemies a certain amount of times before winning, Marked Man where you have to escape people trying to take you down before you get to a certain location, there’s the normal Race, there’s Burning Routes where a specific car must get to a specific location before the time runs out to unlock a better version of that car or there’s Stunt Runs where you must meet the target score by performing heart stopping stunts all around the city - there’s heaps to do. To acquire a new license you must complete a certain amount of events of your choice after which you get a new car and a new license. So the basic jist of the game is to drive around the city, compete in events, unlock cars and continue until you get your “Burnout Elite” license. There’s no real drive to do it other than to unlock new cars. But that’s what’s good about this game; you don’t need that much to keep playing it because it’s just so much fun.
Again touching on the amount there is to do, there are 84 cars, 120 billboards, 50 SuperJumps and 400 smashed scattered around the whole city for you to find. At first it seems they’re everywhere but they will start to become very, very hard to find. Finding them will unlock special Carbon Cars which are great versions of the non-carbon cars and really show off your accomplishments. Every road in Paradise City has a best time and best crash on it for you to beat, both of which are very fun to try and beat. Now all this really says how much there is to do and if that was it, the game has a lot of play time. But no, that is not it. “Really rivalZone? There’s more?” Yep. Lots more!!
The game comes with a super fun online (easily accessed with the right arrow on the D-pad) which really is great fun. You can either start up a Stunt Run, Marked Man, Road Rage or a Race for all players to compete in. All of these modes are great fun to play and won’t get old anytime soon. The game also has a set of Freeburn Challenges and Timed Challenges for the players to compete in with a total of 490 of them, yes 490 of them including the bike challenges. Some can be very very easy where as some will be quite hard but always very entertaining and fun. Even if you don’t feel like doing challenges or playing in an event you and your buddies can just cruise around the city together which in its self is great fun and provides the player with endless laughs, awes and profanity. While driving around Paradise City it keeps your record for most oncoming, longest jump, most air time, most barrel rolls, longest drift, biggest flat spin, best power park and much more including best time for a specific road. So online or offline, there’s always going to be something to do.
The way the game works is that each event ends at a specific point on the map so you have to learn the city and know where to go. You can use the mini-map or the compass and street names at the top but as you get more experienced around the city you will know where to go, which shortcuts to take and which is the quickest and shortest way to that destination. It works really well and is something new but in the early stages can be quite stressful.
While playing in the earlier stages of the game I know I felt like the first car was fast enough and was having some serious trouble not crashing for longer than a mile. I rarely boosted because it was way too fast and wondered why I was given such a fast car for my first one. Well as mentioned earlier, there’s a decent learning curve but for the most part it is very stressful. It does get worse later-on when you get sick of the crashes because you have seen them so much and you just want to race. You start to get quite angry when you crash and it goes into some super dramatic crash that screws you up for the event. But once you get good, you boost all the time and trust me, the cars get much much faster. Don’t fret; a little persistence will get you there.
Graphically this game is stunning. Making the textures for this game would have been a long and tedious task for the Criterion team but their hard work definitely shows. The cars, bikes and the city are amazing. The whole city is filled with vibrant colours and at times, can be distracting because you must admire them. Burnout is a more than beautiful game and won’t disappoint all the graphical gurus out there.
Not only can you use cars in Burnout anymore, Criterion recently released a patch that adds bikes to the game and guess what? It’s FREE. You start off with 2 bikes and again there are plenty of challenges to do. You can race online against other people, do plenty of motorbike challenges and generally it’s a lot of fun. While playing single-player with the bikes the city feels empty. You never get to race against other bikers. That’s really the only problem there is with the bikes; the lack of other bikers. But because the patch was free, it doesn’t matter. Criterion could have easily charged $15-$20 for this and it would have been worth every cent. The bike patch adds about another 15 hours game play to get 101%.
The songs in the game can get quite old fairly quick. Most are good songs but some are really bad. Luckily, the developers over at Criterion know what they’re doing and you can make custom sound tracks. Also, while listening to the normal sound tracks you will hear Burnout’s DJ speak, DJ Atomica. Usually, stuff like this gets old and repetitive very quick but even after my 60 something hours playing he still says funny, witty and useful comments.
Submitted by rivalZone
06/10/2008
535
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