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Burnout Paradise
The single player mode has suffered in order to make this great online multiplayer racer / crasher. The new menu-less free-roaming city feels too vague and unstructured for racing. There aren’t any tracks so to speak as races have turned into point A to point B style races letting you find the best route, but it’s a nightmare trying to keep your eye on the compass, the map and the road. If you screw up a race there isn’t a restart option, this becomes really annoying when you are in the hills and it takes ages to drive back to the city. This could have been fixed with a restart option or even an option to teleport to any event or area of the map, a loading screen would have been forgiven for the convenience.
The new style of races should have only been included as an extra mode rather than replace the traditional circuits. Even more has gone missing from the old titles, controlling your crashes with ‘aftertouch’ has gone so you can’t take out the AI cars when you plough into an oncoming bus at top speed. Crash Mode has been replaced with Showtime, where you bounce your car along in any direction you want hunting down traffic to boost your score and keep the carnage going for as long as possible.
You can no longer hit traffic going in the same direction, you can get away with the odd clip sometimes but it’s inconsistent so it’s best avoiding it altogether when driving.
Marked Man is a new mode where you have to race to the end and survive a pack of cars trying to take you out. Very, very hard.
A strange addition to the series is a handbrake button, this is for all the 90 degree turns you’ll be doing and countless 180s for going back for that turn you missed. You can’t help feel the drifting has been toned down too much to make this seem like a worthy addition.
Try to stick with it because you need to progress through single players events to unlock extra vehicles to give you an edge online, whether you want speed, strength or handling. Some of the later cars are face-meltingly fast while others are more lethal than a train hurtling towards a car stranded on the tracks.
For all you road fiends out there without broadband yet (seriously why?), you’ll be disappointed to learn that there is no offline multiplayer whatsoever. Bad EA! Bad Criterion!
This is all forgiven because of the excellent online mode where clearly most of the development time has been spent. Up to eight players can meet up to complete up to 350 challenges as simple as everyone perform a drift or something requiring more team-work like having seven people park between two jump ramps and the eighth player barrel-rolling over them all! There are a set number of challengers for groups of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 players all requiring everyone to take part. If you want to get them done you better start forming a large varied group of online burners that are like-minded because there’s nothing more annoying than doing a challenge where you all have to meet on the dam waterworks roof and one player is ignoring you all at the other end of the city. Kick em’ out and start again when someone else joins in! As the Host you will be able to boot out any uncooperative players and set up challenges and races.
You can race, but it suffers from the same problems mentioned earlier but at least your human opponents are vulnerable to the same mistakes. Or you can all just mess around crashing into each other or compete for the longest drift or see who dares dodging oncoming traffic for the longest distance.
Another great new feature is the way you can compete with your friends for the best time down a street or the most damage caused in Showtime. If you top both, the sign on the map will turn gold and you will ‘own the road’.
It goes without saying that it all looks incredible too with no lag or pop-up issues at all. The crashes will make you wince and cringe as your car is crushed in half when you barely see the brick wall you’ve just disintegrated into. Though some of the slow motion crashes can really begin to grate as they take forever and the aforementioned aftertouch has been removed.
But hey, PS3 car nuts finally have decent game, so if they can fix the dodgy single player elements and the soundtrack for next year’s game it’ll be perfect. Get playing with a good gang and you’ll enjoy possibly the best online experience yet.
Overall 7/10
Developer:Criterion Games
Publisher: EA
Genre: Driving
Age: 10+
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3
