What the heck is this? Why should I have to take my eyes off the road in order to follow a little minimap or compass at the top of the screen. This is Burnout for Chrissakes – the racing series that has more in common with the white-knuckle shoot ‘em ups of old than Gran Turismo, the game that requires hand-eye coordination sharp enough to identify and deftly avoid the rear end of a bus (versus a harmless compact that can be effortlessly knocked away) while the scenery blurs past at 150 MPH. I really despise the general “Grand Theft Auto-fication” that’s been happening since that monstrosity rocked gaming in the early 2000’s. Burnout was great the way it was, but it had its areas for improvement that could have been addressed in a sequel — new, more varied and exciting race and combat modes could have been added, the “takedown” system could have been revamped into something a bit more skill-based or otherwise involved, gaining points and boost during races could have been less haphazard. Who asked for this?
UPDATE: Well, I feel like an ass now, but I’m obliged to report that Burnout:Paradise is actually friggin’ great. I spent about 5 hours with the full game last night when I should have been doing all sorts of other things, and was actually having a whole heck of a lot of fun. Yes, the open world stuff still was immensely off-putting at first and I still get annoyed when I get thrown off-track during a race. But the truth of the matter is that there is so much to do, and nearly all of it is enjoyable, so even when you do get lost it’s only a matter of time before you stumble across another event to try. No longer are you punished for a loss with a trip to the loading screen and, no doubt, an urge to force yourself to play that same event over and over. They ditched the whole star-rating system (event outcomes are a binary “first place=win, anything else=loss”) so gone is the obsessive need to replay events you just completed in order to line up a neat and clean rack of gold stars on your event menu. And that’s another thing. The more I played this game, the more the previous Burnout games felt somewhat disjointed and incomplete – a long (albeit still addictive) “to-do” list rather than an absorbing universe. I can remember times when I’d be playing “Revenge” and, for a brief moment, wish that I could just tool around with the car a bit just to see what it could do. Sometimes I would even do just that if a race was going poorly. In Paradise, not only can you do just that without penalty, but it’s actually encouraged. While completing events still unlocks the lion’s share of new content, like better cars, and upgrades to your license, just doing stuff like finding all of the secret areas, jumps, billboards to smash, and “mastering” every street (by tearing down it in the fastest time, getting the best “showtime” score, etc) serve to add to your completion percentage.
Best of all, they manages to retain the core feature of the series that should never be messed with: the sense of speed. The game sports high-res textures, tasteful use of realistic lighting, the standard awesome fictional car models, and runs at a 60 FPS clip that absolutely never falters, ever. Ever. Read that again. Oh, and there are no loading screens.
It’s interesting how much this game was misrepresented by its demo. I wonder what sort of effect this will have on publishers’ attitudes towards releasing demos in the future, given that the poor reception of the BOP demo undoubtedly led to some cancelled sales (just speculation on my part, and it remains to be seen how much that really affects the bottom line).
Tags: Burnout, Paradise, Xbox Live Demos
