Burnout: Paradise

There’s nothing like driving on the wrong side of the road. Facing oncoming traffic at over 200 kilometres per hour, cutting through lanes and intersections, and scratching up your fellow drivers. If you think I drive like this on my daily commute, you are definitely wrong. But then again with some drivers, you could be right. Yet these driving conditions are not around these areas. These are the road conditions of Paradise City.

Once again EA and Criterion Games bring us another chapter of Burnout. Burnout: Paradise is the first one to come to the PlayStation 3 and it shows off the horsepower of what’s under the PS3’s hood. You would think they must have exhausted all their ideas in this series. They found enough to take this franchise to the next mile. the game looks great with all the details in Paradise City. It looks like any metropolitan city on the west coast with a beach (ahem San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc.). The city is more of an enclosed island with sections ranging from a downtown core, a horse ranch, high mountain ranges, a windmill farm, harbour and industrial complexes, and a baseball stadium.  All in glorious HD graphics, the colours and the art style bounce off the screen. It’s amazing how the art looks at a standstill while your car is parked for a bit. While parked the game will run a short cinematic 360-degree cycle to see your surroundings, that’s a nice feature. Then you can drive off and continue playing, no load screens required.  The vehicle art is also great eye candy as well. While it’s not your standard licensed array of modern roadsters, they are impressive knock-offs. The custom colours jobs and art decals shine through. Even with the damage animation in full speed or slow motion is impressive. There are some issues that grind my gears during the presentation. Going over super jumps on cliffs and gorges, you expect to see the pay-off results. Sometimes if you don’t make it, you see your car crumbling down the cliff, but where’s the explosion? You jump a bridge at the docks, but you’re taking a dive into the deep end, where’s the splash? Either it cuts back to the action of the race, or results in a simple fade to black, and back to the races. Another gripe is with the loading of animations in the junkyard a.k.a vehicle selection screen. Scrolling through the cars is slow and awkward, to load an animation of a wrecked car dropping in mid-air, something’s not right. Another detail that’s missing in this series is pedestrians. Doesn’t anyone live in Paradise City? Do ghosts drive around in these cars? I would have like to see the addition of this, with drivers inside the cars. Adding pedestrians crossing sidewalks and dodging out of the way of these crazy cars would be a great touch.

The sounds of Paradise City are well put together. The 5.1 mix of the sound of the cars speeding by on your left side vs. your right side is great. The crash noises and braking of barriers, street poles and takedowns are well amplified. Yet the tunes courtesy of EA Trax kinds of suffers. It's that I don’t know some of these indie bands or it seems some of them are played out because I heard them over on Madden ’09 or NHL ’09 or some other EA brand. Some of the music is pulse-pounding with some electronic beats, some hip-hop hybrid, but for the most part, it's hard rock. As well as classic tunes by Twisted Sister and The Ramones. But it’s getting to the point that every Burnout has to have them, like a wedding playing “The Chicken Dance” or “The Twist”. The addition of adding previous tracks from the back catalogues of previous Burnout 2,3, and Revenge as well as classic tracks from Beethoven and Mozart are a nice touch, but its instrumental filler. DJ Atomicka dictates your navigation and tutorial information once again for you. I’m surprised they didn’t switch it up with the voices on Crash FM. I mean they had a sexy woman's voice in the introduction, why not some more from her? It would have given the soundscape some needed variety and colour. 

The gameplay of Burnout: Paradise is a great enjoyment. It incorporates an open-world sandbox setup for Paradise City. So you drive around looking for your events. With the GPS mapping system, you have the option of locking on to what particular event you want to take part in. You have your typical Race Mode, Stunt Run; where you are tricking out jumps and boosting into e-brake swerves, Road Rage; where you are pushing cars side to side in takedowns, and Marked Man; where you are 1 car vs. an army of black cars tracking you down to stop you from crossing the finish line.  The great part of Burnout: Paradise is the online multiplayer accessible on the D-pad. It adopts a jump in, jump out approach to Paradise City as a whole track base. Yet it may take some getting used to for people more accustomed to game lobbies and setting up the appropriate matches you want to start off with. You would think you’ve played all that you can play with Burnout: Paradise.

Yet, with the downloadable content that’s FREE, Criterion Games puts in enough features to make another standalone Burnout franchise. Their first update Cagney Pack gives you online play for all the game modes Road Rage, Marked Man, and Stunt Run. They also managed to cram in their 70 new Freeburn tracks. So all the roads become racetracks with assigned leader board times. They can be beaten in online or offline modes and updated in real-time. Remember how I was iffy on the soundtrack? Well with the Cagney Pack, they’ve added custom soundtrack support. So now you can rip your favourite tunes onto your PS3’s hard drive, create a playlist and enable it to play inside the game.

The second update pack is the Bikes Pack. This adds now, you guessed it; BIKES! You get your choice of two bikes only, but the gameplay and feel of speed are so explosive. An incredible rush in riding these bikes, the crashes are outright crazy. The odd part is that you do see your driver on the bike. Yet when you crash, your driver disappears. It would have been interesting to see a ragdoll driver tossed off the bikes. Along with the bike Freeburn challenges, a new day and night 24-hour cycle to Paradise City is included. The night driving gives a more difficult challenge to the tracks. Along with the day and night option, are the new weather effects. You can experience fog, rain, sunrises, and hazy conditions during your races. A great visual spectacle, as well an extra gameplay dimension to cope with.

The last update (yet I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more in the months to come), is the incorporation of PlayStation Trophies support. Trophies are now collectable on challenges already in the game, as well as on the Cagney and Bike Packs as well. The only downside of the Trophies support patch is that it’s not retroactive to the already completed tasks you’ve already accumulated. This means you’ll have to start the new save game from scratch, to start your trophy collecting.

In the end, Burnout: Paradise is a great arcade racing game. The presentation is phenomenal for this series of next-gen consoles. And it shows through on the PlayStation3. The solid core of gameplay on the game is deep enough to fill your appetite, whether single-player or online multiplayer. If you still got room to stomach more gameplay, the free update packs are a great addition to tie you over until the next chapter of Burnout.