First Impressions: Burnout Paradise – Maybe it's better to fade away

Little over a week ago, I ranted about how if EA could get their heads out of their asses and stop beating necrotic equine corpse of Need For Speed, we might see Criterion produce another title in the Burnout franchise. Well, perhaps they shouldn't.

Burnout Paradise is the “sequel” to my beloved Burnout Revenge, and really brought the game into the current and quickly fading generation of gaming. New paint jobs, new physics and even a shred of new gameplay, Paradise should be everything I asked for right? Not exactly.

Burnout Paradise takes place in the beautifully rendered Paradise City – a town completely devoid of any humans whatsoever, with the exception of the mysterious and irritating DJ Atomika who is to be your guide through this desolate cityscape. Burnout continues it's tradition of removing human beings from the equation and putting you at the controls of what is apparently a sentient car. No drivers or pedestrians are ever spotted in Paradise and rightfully so. What kind of lunatic would live in a town where possessed vehicles rule the roads and slam, shunt and sideswipe each other into oblivion?

However, in Burnout terms, this is par for the course aside from DJ Atomika, who very well may be my largest complaint about this game. In addition to frequent tips on where you should go, what you should do, and basic game mechanics that you understood roughly 10 minutes after start up, DJ Atomika also finds it necessary to make condescending remarks about your performance every time you fail at an event. Fortunately, there is an option in the sound menu that will remove his “tips”. Unfortunately, there isn't an option to turn off his quips.

Graphics – The game looks remarkably good on current-gen hardware – perhaps even better than the 360 release of Revenge. Beautiful iridescent paint jobs screaming through the streets at any hour (since Paradise decided to introduce a day/night cycle) are almost as visually pleasing as the damage models. Every time your car hits something, damage is incurred to some extent. Crumpled hoods, dangling bumpers, missing doors and quarter-pannels, it's all there. On the other side of this coin, Criterion deemed it necessary to engage a slow motion “cutscene” each and every single time you actually wreck. Depending on your speed and angle, the game will then allow physics to manhandle your vehicle for a minimum of 10 seconds while flecks of paint and shattered glass get strewn about the asphalt. Is it pretty? Yes. But it's fucking irritating to have to sit through for the 18th time in 30 minutes. Because, yes, you have to sit through it. There is absolutely no way to accelerate this process nor skip the scene. I understand being placed behind in a race for crashing, but the 20 seconds it takes to get me back on the road in a game all about speed is asinine.

Gameplay – More or less a segue in any case, let's talk about the racing! And the crashing! I guarantee you'll be doing a lot more of one than the other! Let's start with the physics. Burnout Paradise has gotten a bit of an engine upgrade since the last time we saw the franchise and this may or may not be a good thing. Cars behave much more realistically. Drifting, wobbling, loss of control when hit by other racers are all done surprisingly well. Except, here's the issue. Burnout is a FUCKING FANTASY. REALISM was never a remote consideration when someone decided “Let's have a game about driverless cars slamming into one another for the sheer thrill of it!” I miss the days of Burnout Revenge when my mock-up of a European sports car was arguably magnetically attached to the ground, and that rear-ending a civilian minivan hardly dropped my speed, much less crashed me into a million pieces of glossy finish.

So, needless to say, Traffic Attack has been omitted this time around, but Paradise has kept most of the mainstays of the series. Race and Road Rage events are back, along with Burning Route – the point-to-point equivalent of Burning Lap. Keeping things fresh, Criterion has come up with a couple of new events as well. The aptly titled Stunt Run gives you a limited amount of time to perform crash-defying acrobatics (jumps, drifts, etc.) in order to break a certain score threshold. Marked Man events are sort of a hybrid between Race and Road Rage – you're considered the “marked man”. Other drivers will try their damndest to take you down while you race to a fixed point on the map. The important thing here is that the other drivers aren't actually racing you to the finish line. This mode is solely about survival and it quite possibly the most boring part of Paradise. If you pick something heavy and durable, you can do 25mph from start to finish. It might take you 3 hours, but you'll win (if you can call it that).

Since Paradise City is an open world, the method of starting events is to pull up to an intersection and rev your engine (by holding the gas and brake at the same time). Each lighted intersection has an event, and the events are color coded on your mini-map so you can enjoy the ones you want, and skip those that you don't. Additionally, each street has it's own little time attack that you can challenge yourself to in order to “rule” that road. In order to completely dominate the street and establish yourself as the one true “ruler”, you'll also have to enter Showtime Mode. Showtime is where they've put the Crash events from previous Burnout titles. You can cause a pileup anywhere at anytime and try to beat the score for that street. It's a little sad, since Crash events played such a big part in previous titles that they've been relegated to something so insubstantial. Ruling a road doesn't really do much for you. Completing events allows you to level up your license and compete in more difficult events – eventually “beating” the game (unlocking the highest level license). Road Rules are merely there to compete with other players online. So if you're short on friends (like myself), and even shorter on friends who play Burnout Paradise, they're rather negligible.

Normally, I only do First Impressions write-ups on games that I don't plan (see: can't bring myself) to finish. Usually because of some ridiculously stupid mechanic or frustrating gameplay. This isn't really the case with Burnout Paradise. In addition to making it all the way to the top-ranked license, I don't really see myself ever being ABLE to finish it. There are cars to unlock, roads to rule, and over 100 different events to clear (which reset every time your license ranks up). How could I ever manage it all?

Oh, and by the time you all read this, I'll be balls deep in Saints Row IV – and that game fucking owns my ass.