Burnout Paradise (360) - Review

I desperately wanted to like the movie Underworld; no you haven’t opened the wrong page by mistake, just hear me out.  I desperately wanted to like Underworld, and indeed it seemed to have a great many of the elements that I like in a movie: tonnes of action, an interesting plot, vampires, British accents, and just enough gore to keep things interesting.  The previews in the months leading up to Underworld’s release were so tantalisingly mouth-watering in their blood-sucking goodness that I counted down the days to its cinematic release with the kind of single-mindedness usually reserved the bedroom or a Portuguese chicken burger.

Then I actually saw the bloody thing and all my hopes and expectations were dashed away in a roaring tide of mediocrity; Underworld wasn’t that bad, so much as it was a generic, at times nonsensical, but always underwhelming attempt at being an action-horror movie.  In fact, it really just felt like the poor man’s version of Blade; like it tried to be everything to everyone, and thus became a disappointment that diluted all the stuff that made us want to watch it in the first place.

See where I’m going with this one then?

Burnout Paradise is the Underworld of the current gaming scene; it seeks to reinterpret what came before it, but with a modern, ultra-polished late-naughties spin; it also makes a valiant attempt to bring some new ideas to the table.  It’s just a shame that developer Criterion seems to have gotten a bit lost along the way and forgot what it was that made players love Burnout so much in the first place; easy to play, hard to master ultra-fast gameplay that rewarded skill and sheer balls-to-the-wall gumption.

Things start off well enough, with some damn pretty (damn, damn, DAMN pretty) graphics and a soundtrack that somehow manages to combine Guns n Roses, Avril Lavigne, and a N.E.R.D remix and actually pull it off (seriously, it’s remarkable).  Paradise City itself is so impressive that you will be gobsmacked; a huge, completely open city, made up of a variety of different districts and terrains, and all of which is open from the get go; no artificial barriers blocking your way here.  Plus all the vehicles are gorgeous looking, and all the various new graphical doohickeys are obviously in full effect, including all that fancy lighting stuff and other such pieces of technical wizardry.

Once you’ve started up your car, you have the freedom to go anywhere you want and do anything you want within the game world; various events are started by spinning your tyres at traffic lights, and are denoted by different coloured icons on your map.  The events themselves are completely open; you can generally use any vehicle, and can choose to go anywhere or use any shortcut you want.  There is a good variety on offer here, with the usual races, burning laps, and road rages being complimented by the Marked Man events, in which you have to reach a certain point while having the tar pummelled out of you by a series of angry black cars.

While the open world, open plan racing sounds great in theory, in practice it becomes, quite frankly, a gigantic pain in the muffler.  Unlike prior “open” racing games (like the sublime Midnight Club 3), which gave a pretty good indication of where you should go, Paradise is a lot more obtuse.  The most signal you will get for when you should make a turn is a flashing sign and a beeping when you’re right on top of it, but this is usually insufficient unless you’ve planned things out beforehand; the recommended turn offs can also sometimes defy logic in terms of direction or best time.

The most glaring problem, however, is the simple fact that it is impossible to be truly competitive early on in the single player without constantly pausing the game to open up the map; this kind of thing is fine in an RPG, but we can do without it in an edge of your seat arcade racer, thank you very much Criterion!  Sure you’ll eventually learn the city well enough that you can work most routes out by rote, but having to pause constantly in a racer is just criminal. 

The most amazing part of this difficult navigation system is the fact everything could have been fixed pretty easily; how about a whopping big direction arrow at the top of the screen, or making the minimap big enough to actually be useful; hell, what about a waypoint system? They’ve been used in other games, and tend to actually work pretty well.  The fact is that anything would have been better than the big fat nothing currently on offer here.

More difficulties arise when you realise that, despite the huge amount of events on offer, most of them feel pretty much exactly the same; races only ever end at one of eight different points around the map, meaning that you’ll be driving down the same stretches of road more often than you would like considering there is a whole city on offer here.  The road rage events, while still fun, have had a big part of their skill factor removed due to the fact that there is no track; you can roam anywhere you like, and there will always be cars for you to smash, meaning that it’s simplicity itself to just navigate to a tight bridge or tunnel and shred the required amount of cars in seconds.

The Stunt events are equally as pointless; big jumps give multipliers to your score, meaning that you just need to memorise the location of a couple of nearby ramps, get some boost, and you’ll have broken the required score limit with literally minutes to spare.  And don’t even get me started on the Crash mode replacement “Showtime”; at any point you like you can detonate your car, and then roll it into traffic; there is no skill involved here at all, as it is a piece of cake to keep rolling along, hitting cars and racking up the points.  If you find some busses (which act as score multipliers) then victory is assured, thus ensuring that the whole stupid Showtime mode revolves entirely around dumb luck and randomly spawning vehicles, instead of the skill and split-second timing needed in previous games.

I also would like to take a moment to mention DJ Atomica; or, as my partner and I have taken to calling him, DJ SHUT THE F**K UP YOU SMARMY LITTLE GIT; never, in the history of videogaming, has there been a single character more consistently annoying than this guy.  It’s just not right that you want to mute the game because of some idiot radio announcer/narrator/tutorial guy, but Atomica will have you fingering the mute button with perverse joy (almost as perverse as saying “fingering the mute button” in a sentence) just for the sheer pleasure of cutting off his voice; bad move there Criterion.

I realise that this review is coming off as overly negative, and it is to a certain extent.  It’s not that Paradise is a bad game; it’s not, and is actually quite fun for a while.  But once you’ve lost a race for the umpteenth time because of the stupid map system, or realised that your favourite events from prior games in the series have been robbed of any challenge, you realise that this game just has not lived up to what it promised.  The huge, beautiful, and undoubtedly fun to explore game world is all well and good, but not when it severely compromises what made Burnout so great in the first place.

Criterion dropped the ball with Paradise and delivered a game that does not live up to the Burnout name; this is pretty much the best example you will find of a game not equalling the sum of its parts. But there is still hope; various upgrades and downloadable content are on the way, and if nothing else there is so much potential here that you have to figure the next Burnout game will get it right.  As it is, Paradise is a fun, but ultimately highly frustrating game that has diluted everything that made Burnout so great in the first place. 

Maybe it could have used some vampires?

               

Graphics: 9/10 (A gorgeous game with all the latest and greatest effects, plus a sun-drenched art style and beautiful city that just scream next-gen.)

Sound: 8/10 (A soundtrack that varies from great to terrible, and yet all of it seems appropriate and fits the game…even Avril! The car sounds, crashes, etc are all suitably brutal sounding, and there are no real flaws here except for thrice-cursed DJ Atomica.)

Gameplay: 6/10 (Elements of the old Burnout fun shine through, and some of the new touches are enjoyable; other design decisions will leave you scratching your head; some will leave you gouging out your own eyes in frustration.)

Longevity: 7/10 (Plenty on offer here, and the seamless multiplayer is enjoyable; there also seems to be a great deal of time being dedicated to expanding the playing experience through downloadable content.)

Overall: 6.5/10 (A game with so much brilliant potential that struggles under the weight of it’s new and supposedly exciting rebirth.  Giant city, giant problems, and the stuff that is wrong with this game manages to overshadow the good things all too often.  Paradise is a fun game, and even brilliant at times; just not all the time, and sometimes the fun feels all too thin on the ground.)

      

- Tim Sweeney