Burnout Paradise Review


It’s always hard for me, at the end of year, to apply labels and numbers to my favorite games released in the last twelve months. I play far too many games across far too many genres to ever feel comfortable in putting one before the other or drawing a line in the sand and saying X is better than Y because of Z. I have a hard time putting together my all time, desert-island list of games for similar reasons. 

How to compare a racing game to a shooter? How to compare arcade sports to simulation sports? For that matter, how to compare an RPG developed in the West to an RPG developed in Japan?

I certainly feel that there are games that come out every year whose importance to the genre could be easily quantified. Or the industry in general. Or pop-culture broadly.

Burnout Paradise is the type of game I would have no qualms about taking to a desert island. I’ve played it numerous times on both the XBOX and the PS3. I’ve made sure to download every new update and game-changing add-on the day of release. It’s on my (non-numbered) list of favorite games from last year. Besides World of Warcraft, I spent more time playing Burnout last year than any other game.

As a note, to signify the importance of this statement, let me just say the average time I spend playing a game is usually ten hours. The game clock on my Burnout Paradise save currently reads ninety-six hours.

Burnout Paradise is a very important game to the racing genre. And to console games in general. And to online functionality broadly. The game is fun and easy to play; it offers what I would consider to be an extreme emphasis on pick-up-and-play mechanics. Even when you crash your car, the event is presented in such a way so that you don’t feel bad. In fact, you feel pumped; you feel ready to go. You feel excited to keep racing, but at the same time, you’re excited to see the next crash.

Failing in racing games has never been fun before Burnout.

The game is immensely entertaining and offers the exact type of experience that its log line promises: fast cars, cool locales and awesome crashes. And most importantly, it’s a racing game not built around menus or ladder matches or abstraction. Everything you do, you do in the game. Drive up to an intersection, jam on the gas and brake simultaneously and you’re now racing in an event. Drive through a paint shop to change the color of your car. Crash into AI racers to add their ride to your garage.

Of course, this is all built around a very specific, very designed progression that is easy to see when you look for it. But taking the game at face value, all the stupid things that have made racing games of the past not quite games have all been ditched in Burnout. Play the game how you want to, in the order that you want to. Completionists will eventually see everything anyway. Casual gamers (the majority of the audience) will only see what they want to see. They will get out of the game exactly what they want, no more, no less.

As a piece of entertainment, Burnout Paradise is near perfect. Navigation is tricky if you don’t learn the roadways, and learning the roadways is a matter of trial and error, something that is never quite fun. The ability to restart a race you’re losing has only been added to the game recently, more than a year after the game was originally released. There was much complaining, and some justifiable reasons from the developer for doing so, but again, not being able to restart a race you’re about to lose isn’t ever fun.

These are niggling details. Worth little when compared to the whole.

Burnout Paradise sings as a piece of exciting, spectacular, entertainment. It jumps over most every other racing game out there by simply ensuring that every single second of the game is fun and engaging. Even if you’re frustrated with the game, the cars are brutally fast and they control like a dream. Just driving around for the hell of it has never been better in the genre. There are numerous details and hidden gems to find in the game. Most important though, it can be played and enjoyed by casual players, as well as hardcore racing fanatics.

Burnout Paradise is special. It doesn’t try to say anything about the human condition. It doesn’t want to. It entertains, from beginning to end. And every time you want to go back to it, it continues to be exciting, it offers you new challenges and shows you the coolest car crash you’ve ever seen outside of a Michael Bay movie.  

1 comments:

  • I was very very late to the party on Burnout Paradise but I have to agree with you: it's not just a significant racing game, it's a significant game period. It's like you say: a lot of games promise that you can play them when you want however you want, but often fun gets lost in the shuffle (see: Far cry 2)

    This point about making failure enjoyable is really important too. As much as I loved Burnout Revenge, I spent so much time trying to crack the same challenge over and over. This is generally how games punish failure: they force you to repeat the same challenges over and over.

    This is what I loved about Burnout Pardise. Except when your botched race attempt ends out in the western boonies, there was always another challenge right there to try out. It's a brilliant piece of design.

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