Customer Reviews

Burnout Paradise

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(44)
3 star:		(18)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

My credentials: long-time gamer, played many a game, many a racer, have my Burnout license and nearing the Elite license. Burnout, in my opinion, has always been the most fun and easiest racer to pick up and play. It's not a SIM and of course isn't trying to be...So here's the pros and cons vs other racers, other arcade racers, other Burnout franchise releases and the 360 vs PS3 versions.

PROS
- Burnout is easy to pick up, easy to understand, easy to play...obviously there is some challenge.
- open-world racing is the future and it is a much better presentation
- ROAD RAGE takedowns are easier and more fun
- realism of the textures, physics and the environment seem to have been improved. The attempt here is for a real city, not fake arcade racer routes with the gigantic "for dummies" lighted arrows telling you where to go
- they've added some more things to do such as parking, jumps, crash through billboards and gates, etc...there are tons of these.
- it wipes the mat with other "fun" racers like Flatout, which can be so difficult and frustrating (for some) the fun is simply turned down to zero...
- racing games are probably the most frustrating of any gaming genre (RPG, FPS, whatever). Burnout is the least frustrating of any racer ever.
- crashing into things doesn't (always) crash your car as per previous Burnout installments
- achievements (360-only) are no longer impossible, as it was with Burnout Revenge...
- popping in-and-out online is easy
- you can put your own face on your license if you have a cam. Mine has my middle finger.
- helpful "turn indicators" letting you know when you need to turn (because you are flying at a million miles an hour - you'll need `em)

NEUTRAL
- open-world racing isn't new. Criterion seems to think they have created some kind of next-gen revolution here. Test Drive Unlimited did this already and did so successfully (and technically so has Grand Theft Auto if you allow it to partially be in the genre). TDU clearly isn't as much fun as Burnout, but it isn't supposed to be. Criterion could learn some things from Eden games and vice versa.
- no upgrades. TDU has a tinge of SIMs flavor where you collect money, properties and cars. Win more races, collect more cars, upgrade upgrade upgrade. Upgrades give you more to do. Sort of like an RPG. Burnout has none. You just get a new car, done, that's it.
- TRAFFIC ATTACK has been removed, but in REVENGE, the dollars would pop-up blocking your view making that event difficult and annoying anyway
- ELIMINATOR is gone, but I don't miss it that much
- TAKEDOWN REVENGE is gone. Whatev.
- PS3 vs 360 versions: barely a discernable difference and hat's off to Criterion for caring about both platforms. 360 gets achievements; PS3 gets sixaxis (which could be a blessing or a curse if they don't know what they are doing...see LAIR). Whatev.

CONS
- some idiot thought it was a good idea to remove one of the most fun things in the most fun racer of all time: CRASH MODE. They replaced it with this horrible Katamari-esk "SHOWTIME" thing where you just perpetually roll and bounce off of cars because that's definitely more realistic and fun... This is unforgivable. CRASH events were formerly an integral (AND FUN) part of Burnout in which you couldn't progress through the game without completing them. I could giggle for hours doing these events where you cause millions of dollars of damage by slamming into huge tanker trunks. Now, you don't need to even do them at all, and why would you, since they're no longer fun whatsoever. They had a great opportunity to create some epic accident scenes here where hilarity would ensue. This is like playing HALO and discovering they took out plasma grenades...EPIC FAIL!!!!!!!!
- AFTERTOUCH is gone. Another one of the most innovative, cool and fun things to do...GONE. FAIL!
- CRASHBREAKER is gone. Yet another EPIC FAIL! This was incredibly fun to both do and watch...
- the little trophies for performing this or that trick are gone.
- the BURNING ROUTE events which are supposed to give you better versions of your vehicle often give you equal or even worse versions...
- stats for some vehicles don't seem to make sense. The 4x4 truck is supposed to be as tough, but faster than the van, but I've played with both for quite awhile and there's simply no way in h*ll the truck is faster than the van.
- no instant retry/restart race. What? Why? You have to drive all the way back to restart...
- no split-screen vs. Huh? What's that about? I can't have a buddy sitting right next to me play with me? WTF?
- DJ Atomica is a massive tool. I have nothing against his sexual preference. Frankly, I think it's none of our business. I fully support gay rights 100%. But aside from all that, this guy is completely annoying.

END RESULT: Criterion has given with one hand but taken with the other. Open-world is a nice and pleasing presentation and takedowns are as fun as ever, but the removal of MANY of the things that made game fun to play in the first place is puzzling...

Often when a game company says they are going reinvent a game, especially one that has such a great history as Burnout, I get a bit nervous. Unfortunately my worries were warranted. Yes the open map is great. The graphics look outstanding and the sense of speed is still there. The big problem is that they removed or drastically changed two of the best parts of the game. No split screen makes the game single player only unless you want to hook up two xbox 360s on lan or use xbox live. The lack of co-op takes this down a full two stars for me. Playing with a friend or roommate was some of the most fun I've had with this console. The other star is removed because of the lack of a restart and crash mode. I'm not really sure why they thought that it would be less annoying, because no restart makes this one of the must frustrating racing games right now. Then we have the lack of crash mode. Seriously, your franchise was sort of built on this idea and you remove it? Showtime is not even remotely the same except for the money you gain. Which, by the way, I have yet to find a use for. The challenge of having to play a run to hit cars and figure out how to create that stunning chain reaction is completely gone. Now, you can just enter Showtime mode at anytime. However, all you do is flip and hit cars. If you can get the timing down, you can essentially bounce across the entire map. Which is just boring. All in all, it's a great racing game and a great looking game, but this isn't Burnout.

I traded it away this morning and there is this great sense of calm in my soul. You see, Revenge was maybe my favorite 360 game. Maybe my favorite racer ever. It was near perfect. Not realistic, but who wants that? Each race was beautiful chaos. That's the problem here. Risk no longer equals reward. Burnout Paradise is the Alien 3 of this series.

The most frustrating aspect of this game is you're better off playing it safe to really pushing the envelope. Because, unless you memorize every inch of the CITY (not track like the previous game, here there is no track), you're doomed to catch some pointless extention to a guard rail here, a side mirror on a parked car there, etc. trying to avoid a non-combative car in your way that you no longer can rear end and use as a pinball physics weapon on the other drivers. Nope, here everything is death. Now I'm pro death and like hard games, but the best offense in this game isn't mayhem, it's Sunday driving. Casually drive around without turbo unless you're trying to force a car off the road. It terrible.

Marked Man makes no sense because you can't actually LOSE the cars chasing you, they just pop up. So why go fast? Just drive carefully, it's not like time is a factor. Rampage? Again, the enemy cars don't get you 90% of the time, some random bystander does. So why go fast?

Maybe that this game's greatest flaw. It's ironically repetitious. The events all feel the same. The cars all feel the same. You just change cars as another time killer (drive to the junkyard) so that you have one that doesn't die on two hits or will spin around in a Stunt event. This formally was accomplished by selecting the car before the race as a menu. MUCH FUNNER! Thanks guys. Given, chasing down cars and crashing them to "earn" them between event is fun... but that's all you do. So again, boring fast and better when it was called Rampage with eight other cars.

I like the Technical merits of this game and understand why they felt this was the "next step", which keeps me from giving it a 1. But this game should be a warning like Tony Hawk Underground and Shemue that walking/driving/skating from event to event is not in itself a good game. GTA was good because the mini-games were varied and the stealing/killing/rooming "menu" had it's own charms. Burnout does not for the most part.

Burnout Paradise, for me, was the best game of 2008, and if you haven't had a chance to play it yet, it's not to late. Now is your chance to play this incredibly fun and addicting arcade racing game. If you don't like racing games or like sim racing games, then it will be obvious that you won't like this game.

So why exactly did I name this the best game of 2008 for me? I'm a fan of the Burnout series in general (the mechanics are what makes the game so appealing), and I personally love racing games, for the most part of my life. This game is just so addicting. With gobs of modes. Burnout's AI seems less rubberband that it has in the past, which makes the game more easier. The physics engine is a wonder, something about the sastifying crunch of watching cars explode makes the game so fun. And the sense of air and jumps is great too, and it makes those races more action packed. Plus, being open roaded, all of those races can end up anyway you want. The controls are amazing and intiutive, as you will have no trouble powersliding and controlling your car. They are perfect at control, you must give the game that.

And racing through Paradise City is a blast. Paradise City really is a paradise. Lush forests. And there's hardly a repeat building, as, like a real city, you won't see much of the same buildings (look at the excellent Test Drive Unlimited's map and you'll see what I mean). The graphics are gorgeous, the damage is awesome to watch, the game runs as smooth as butter, and the lighting is amazing. The sound is great as well, I like the start up sounds, the roaring of the car, the works.

To confirm other people's woes, yes, there is no crash mode, which is kind of a disappointment. While this certainly is a loss (especially with the highly tuned , I personally was too busy playing races, unlocking cars, and playing the aforementioned crash mode. I also found the stunt mode to be a little hard, especially because, as a non-creative person, it's kind of hard for me to chain combos together. It's not much of a mode for me, and it's the only pair of race events I haven't won yet. Other than that, I was very pleased with what the game gave us in terms of events.

If you were one of those people that loved crashing matchbox cars together in the schoolyard, then this game will be a delight. This is the game that hotwheel launching kids have been waiting for. There's no reason for expensive hot Wheels playsets when you have this videogame. It's not quite the best game of 2008 yet (since Midnight Club is yet to be released), but this is the game that I have been waiting for. You may not like it as much as I did, but it still is a must play game, especially if your the aforementioned car crashing kid inside.

I hate this game. I cannot express in words the degree to which I hate this game. If this game were a person, I could run it down with my car and not feel the slightest twinge of ethical concern. I hate it so much it leads me to forget things that I've been trained to know are right and good and simply shout expletives in its general direction for the next few hundred words. Fortunately for this game, I'm not quite that much of a jerk.

Imagine that you took Test Drive: Unlimited and the last decent Burnout title, smashed them together, and then carefully excised everything even remotely fun from the mangled monstrosity that resulted. There, my friend, you have found Burnout Paradise. Everything about Revenge that entertained me enough to keep from snapping the disc in half and tossing it into traffic has been removed from this game, and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anybody.

One thing that I can't fault the game for is its appearance, which is certainly a step up. The game is definitely beautiful. Driving through Paradise City, you get to see a lot of different environments, and every single one springs off the screen and directly into your face like some kind of carnivorous monster. When it comes to useful visuals for the gameplay, however, there's some problems with the level of detail included in the game's environments - specifically, I have a hard time figuring out where the bloody road turns in some locations. This is worst in the downtown areas and best on the outskirts of town, but ANY time I miss my turn because it doesn't look like there's a road there at all, somebody needs to yell at the graphical designer.

The game sound is mostly unremarkable, so let's not. It won't make you physically angry, and I guess that you might like the soundtrack (I personally loathed roughly 80% of the included music, but that's not atypical for me with an EA title), but it's not going to pleasure you sexually or make you reevaluate your life.

My problems with the game all have to do with the gameplay, or, rather, the lack thereof. If you've played Revenge, you might remember fun modes like Traffic Attack or Crash Mode. Those were pretty terrific, right? Well, they're gone. Not only are they gone, but some of the fundamental rules that you would have learned from prior games in the series have been utterly invalidated. The big one is the rules on What Kind of Traffic Causes Crashes. In Revenge, they had a simple rule - if you could see headlights or it was a truck, you would wreck into it. Otherwise, you knock it to the side. I don't know what they replaced that with, but I DO know that in the first hour I played, I wrecked against no fewer than ten cars stopped at intersections, smaller than me, facing away from me.

Of greater concern is the bald stupidity that comes from building an open world street racing game in a world that nobody has ever been to. If this game were set in San Marcos, TX, I'd be all over it because I KNOW WHERE THOSE STREETS ARE. I don't know where anything is in this game and the game doesn't do anything at all to help you learn. I'm faced, as a newcomer, with the choice between spending ten hours losing hard just to learn where everything is (not fun) and just plain losing because I don't know where anything is (also not fun). Closed tracks are fun because it's hard to get lost. I got lost in three of my first ten events in this game and ended up on practically the wrong side of town. That's bad.

I could go on for a thousand more words, but I won't belabor my point too heavily. The game has been well received, and maybe it's just me. Maybe people who like "open world" style games will find something to enjoy here. I didn't. I found Test Drive to be a better implementation of the idea. With limited modes that mostly feel identical, no Crash mode (seriously - Crash mode was a puzzle game and that was FUN; Showtime is entirely random), undirected gameplay, poor layout, and any number of other problems, this game would have to come with chocolate cake and my own personal supermodel before I would even consider recommending it. There's a lot of potential for an open world Burnout game, but this isn't the game to realize that dream.

After playing games like Burnout 3, this game seems a little shallow, the open world isn't as fun as it sounds, there aren't too many tipes of game, the showtime is great at first but after a few times it's just boring..

the game has great graphics, great controls, but Burnout used to be a good crashing game. Now the crashing seems to be a secondary objective in a game that doesn't have a primary one.

I have been a fan of Burnout since I played Burnout 2, and I completely feel like Burnout Paradise ruins the franchise and sucks all of the fun out of it, and here is why:

Burnout has always been about racing crazily and since three it has been about the takedowns. However, both of these aspects are greatly diminished in this game. Because of the open world nature there is no set path from point A to point B, this means that in most of the races I have played, with the exception of the very beginning of the race I don't even have a chance for takedowns. The racing itself is diminished because I don't know where the heck I am suppose to go. In the short time I have played it I have lost multiple races because I either took a wrong turn, wrecked because I turned to late or to early, or wrecked because I was to busy looking at the stupid little map to figure out where I was suppose to turn that I hit something in front of me. Having to spend the entire race trying to figure out where I am suppose to go and how to get there takes a lot of the fun out of weaving through traffic, drifting, and taking down opponents. More than anything the ambiguity of the stupid open world races detracts from the fun I can have with the game.

However, there are multiple other problems that get in the way of Burnout Paradise being fun for me. First, I really don't like the open world structure. I get that it can be fun to drive around and explore the world,but that should not hinder me from doing what I want to do. If I want to race I first have to drive around looking for a race, and once I find one I had better win because the only way to redo if I lose is to back track and figure out where the starting line was, because there is not restart option. It also frustrates me that if I want to do a Burning lap, then i have to have a specific car. If I do not happen to be in that car then I have to drive around till I find a junk yard, switch cars, and that hope beyond hope that I can actually remember at which random intersection the Burning lap event was at. I know that the argument is that there is so much to do, that I can just go on to the next stoplight and do a different event, but that is a crap argument. If the game is going to have an open world structure and tell me do whatever you want to do then it shouldn't impede me from doing just that. Burnout Paradise really needs a fast travel option, so if I just want to do races, or just want to Burning laps, and not mess with trying to find the stupid things then I should be able to.
Finally, I dislike the complete lack of crash mode. For me Burnout Crash has always been a highlight of Burnout and making one without Crash mode would be like making Gears of war without chainsaws

I absolutly hate Burnout Paradise, and it frustrates me that I appear to be in the minority (though based on Internet forums not by that wide of a margin) which means that future Burnouts will be more like this one.

if you're looking for a solid arcade racing game, Burnout is your best bet. No adjusting weight, no engine micro-management, or adjusting gear ratios here. Nope, just pure speed and wreck induced adrenaline.

Graphics-wise Burnout Paradise is beautiful, the cars look magnificent and the sun-washed vistas and city streets look spectacular. The high speed effects are really engrossing; I've had to back off the throttle a few times because I felt I couldn't handle how fast buildings were zipping past. The wrecks are pretty intense, with bits and parts flying in every direction, and the car models really reflect the amount of punishment that is inflicted upon them.

On the audio front, this game is great. Nothing beats unlocking a new car and laying rubber to the nearest junkyard(where cars can be swapped out) to jump in and just to crank the engine over and listen to the sinister growl of a muscle car, or the nice, tight rev of an import tuner. The crash sound effects are amazing, with screeching steel on steel, thumps, pops, and shattering glass.

- It should be noted that the in game music without a doubt ROCKS.

Game modes are pretty varied, so if you find yourself getting bored with say, just racing, there are plenty more options to choose from. My favorite mode is the crash mode, where you control your car in slow motion steering it through intersections, oncoming traffic and the like trying to rack up as much collateral damage as possible.

With the downloadable content now out on PS3 and Xbox 360 (both free of charge) you can scream all over Paradise city on bikes!

The selection of vehicles is immense, and many gamers will have their hands full unlocking them all. Car customization is basic ranging from a surprising amount of styles, colors, and finishes.

I haven't played Burnout online yet but from what I see the options for multiplayer are pretty modest, with leaderboards, best times, best wrecks all available real-time.

I know it's not the same as the other but I already have those. I think it takes a bit of getting used too but I like open map style. The game keeps flowing without all the time to keep loading new events. I love the hidden passeges and challenges.

The only feature I miss is a split screen mode so I can play with my friends who come over.

Burnout Paradise is the best driving/racing game in console history and second best game for XBox 360 to Halo 3. Hours and hours of playability and just as fun to watch as it is to play!