Title Burnout Paradise Date 02.09.2008 Genre Racing Platform PlayStation 3 Developer Criterion Publisher EA

In the gaming industry today, it is very difficult to come up with a smash hit. However, once you have a smash hit in your hands, it is very easy to simply remake the game and add a little bit of new content here and there. It's a low risk strategy that will usually keep a series afloat, however, if too little is changed, the series stagnates (*cough*MADDEN*cough*). Once in a while, however, a developer will go the extra mile and practically remake a new installment in the series from scratch. The only problem with this is that some people don't like it when the developers mess with games they like, and as such they completely refuse to buy the game. This is problematic for many reasons, including the fact that this discourages developers from innovating and improving their games through risk taking. When it works, though, it works excellently, and Criterion took a huge risk and I think Burnout reaped a huge gain from it.

Burnout Paradise is unlike any other Burnout game in that it's free-roaming. While this might seem little, it actually destroys the old Burnout formula and completely rebuilds it. No more menus to get into a race; now you can just drive to a stoplight and enter an event. If you want a new car, scour the streets for a rival car that might be prowling around and wreck it to add it to the Junkyard (your garage). If you're bored, cruise around and look for billboards to ram and secret gates to smash through. Paradise City is huge, and I can guarantee that you'll want to familiarize yourself with the terrain. It helps to just drive around for a little while exploring the concrete jungle (and occasionally doing barrel rolls with your car and jumping insane gaps along the way). Races are no longer confined; instead you can now find your own way to the finish. While this might put some people off, it's pretty hard to completely screw yourself over by getting lost, so don't worry about that.

I could equate Burnout Paradise to Call of Duty 4. COD4 completely rebuilt the Call of Duty franchise. No more World War II. No more Nazis. It kept the gameplay elements that have always made Call of Duty one of the best shooting series of all time, but it presented them in a completely new setting with a lot of stuff that had never been in Call of Duty games before. Call of Duty 4 made magic through these risks and it is an excellent, excellent game. Burnout Paradise is essentially the same thing - it still feels like Burnout, but it isn't really Burnout, and in a good way.

The graphics in the game are beautiful. The PS3 was the lead platform for Burnout Paradise, and it shows, with superior graphics over the 360 version. There's very little that has a rough look to it, and there are no major frame-rate dips or screen tearing. You can tell that they've really pushed the PS3 hardware to the limits with some of the lighting effects and by the way some of the cars look. The crashes are also another great part of Burnout - if they didn't look so great, you wouldn't quite get the same "HOLY CRAP, DID YOU SEE THAT?" effect from them. Whenever your car smashes into something, the screen cuts to a "crash cam” and you can see your car slam into other cars or guardrails or pillars in high-definition glory, sending shards of glass and fragments of metal everywhere. When the "crash cam" goes into slow motion, everything looks unbelievably polished.

What's most impressive about the free-roaming aspect of the game is that the core gameplay of Burnout wasn't destroyed by it. Before I opened up the game, I caught myself thinking: "What if this game is a complete bust? What if free-roaming completely destroys it? Should I take it back?" However, all my doubts disappeared right about the time of my first Road Rage event. The takedowns, the sense of speed, the insane cinematic crashes; everything felt like Burnout. I'm really glad to see that the Burnout formula remains largely intact while they've completely rebuilt the game (and hopefully the rest of the series).

While there are no licensed cars in the game, there are some obvious "CTRL+Vs" (the Hunter Mesquite looks quite a bit like an El Camino...), and even if there weren't any, it still doesn't detract from the fun at all. The cars are also divided into three distinct classes this time around, with their own benefits and shortcomings. The Aggression type, for example, will fill boost faster by running other cars off the road and are great in combat, but suffer a little in the speed department. Overall, I believe there are 75 or so cars to be unlocked, so if you want a full Junkyard you're going to have to do quite a bit of hunting. Cars this time around are unlocked by finding the driver and taking them down, and while it can be somewhat tedious searching for them, you'll usually find them when you aren't even looking for them, at which point anything you might have been doing goes promptly out the window as you try your hardest to run him off the road.

The finest part of the Burnout games is still intact in this installment; I can't stress that enough. The speed is still there; you'll feel your eyes sting as you blaze down a thoroughfare or boost around a curve. The crashes still give you that "ragdoll physics+car" feel that's consistent in each and every Burnout. I cannot reiterate the fact that this is still Burnout at its core, and Burnout has always been AAA racing at its finest.

There are a lot of extra thing tossed into Burnout Paradise, and one of my favorite things to do is to steer my cars with the tilt functionality of the Sixaxis. While it isn't perfect, I can still drive competently, and it's fun to have to swerve out of the way of a collision while actually mimicking the motions. It could be a bit tighter, but I'm not complaining. The music in the game, however, is EA's special brand of monotony, and I would much prefer it if there was an option to stream music from the hard drive (although I hear a PS3 firmware update is en route that will fix that). There are a lot of jumps, billboards, and secret areas to find, so replayability is as strong as ever. Even without those little extras, replayability would still be very high thanks to free roaming.

The bottom line is that this game has completely redefined Burnout, but it still feels like Burnout. If you're a Burnout fan who's sort of flip-flopping on whether to get this or not, I would have to say that I highly recommend it. It's the same Burnout engine, but with a fresh new chassis and a coat of paint. Even if you've never tried a Burnout game, you owe it to yourself to try this out. I could not seriously say "Don't buy this" to anyone, because it's such an excellent title that's made huge improvements over its predecessors.

Game Score

B

Reviewed By: Contributed