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After growing up with video games I've been away from the world for a little while, and so come at this game with both a tad of experience but with a whole lot of wonder about how far games have come. I've not played any of the previous versions of Burnout, and am not hypercritical about which features I "need" or might be missed. I'm just a guy who wanted to relax a bit with a game. Games aren't my life. They are a temporary diversion on occasional free moments.
Maybe that's why I like Burnout Paradise so much. It makes so few demands. It doesn't require a long period of orientation. There's no major storyline to envelop me. It's just driving. Driving however and wherever I want.
The controls are easy to pick up. I got a feel for it within moments and for a while enjoyed just cruising, enjoying the very realistic and expansive sights.
Then I started to notice what the game itself had to offer as a game. A few different kinds of races. There is the take out, in which the goal is to knock opponents out of action during a set amount of time. There's the standard race: get from point A to point B before your five opponents, taken any route you want. The first time I tried I got behind, then made a wrong turn, got separated from the pack and just kept driving. I was laughing how I wasn't in this for the win, when all of a sudden the pack came off to my side, and I found myself in the first position. I inadvertently had found a shortcut. Went my own way and won.
The other kind of race pits you against two crash cars who are trying to take you out. The goal is to make it to the finish line without being totaled.
And for those Jackass moments you can crash, scoring in this mode for how long you can keep your crashing car bouncing from one car to another, increasing your cash value of destruction.
Along the way you can pick up new kinds of cars, though none are 'real' licensed cars they do reflect familiar models. You can get new paint jobs and otherwise find the occasional treat. Races are easy to find. There's one at every stoplight. Meaning you can sit and do what you want without following a script or otherwise being forced to progress as the game demands. This makes Burnout Paradise a fun, visually amazing, game that makes for a great, long lasting, distraction.
It's not one of those games you can get lost in, that is amazing in its constant complexity and strategy. It's a driving game, and a driving game that really frees you to just drive.
Definitely worth getting.
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From a mom's perspective, this was a so so game....but from my son's perspective, this game ROCKED entirely! He loved it from beginning to end and ended up taking it to college and not leaving it home for his younger brother! EEK!
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I have long been a fan of video games and usually enjoy racing games. I strayed away from the Burnout franchise when I started playing the Need for Speed games. I decided to give this game franchise another shot and was not impressed too terribly much.
First I will talk about the positives of this game.
The music soundtrack is second to noe. It's great, I love it. I also like that the developers made it rather simple to switch tracks if you so desire.
The graphics are sharp, crisp, ad look fairly real. The city is laid out well, as much as a video game city can be anyway, there will always be those weird twists and turns but that's okay with me.
Some things I didn't like.
The camera angles are annoying at times, and terrible at other times. It seems that no matter how nice a game can look, developers keep screwing up the camera angles making it hard to see things. It gets frustrating very quickly.
The layout of the screen. There are so many things going on, that you have to look at the little map at the bottom of the screen, the compass at the top of the screen, that you are not really allowed to lose yourself in the game. The only time I was really able to 'watch' the graphics and appreciate the game, was when a friend was playing it.
The controls are average in terms of layout, but I would have liked the option of customizing them to how I like it.
Overall, this is a decent racing game, although, if I had to pick my current favorite is still Need for Speed Carbon It offers the same free roam style of play, but has a much better story mode and crisper handling. And, it's cheaper. To me Carbon has more bang for the buck. Burnout Paradise seems to be full of promise but lacking on the follow through.
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I played this myself, and I have 5 and 9 year old sons who also played, and we all enjoyed it. Initially it was a little confusing and I highly recommend the tutorials. Once we got into the game it was quite fun, even for my 5 year old who didn't understand half of it but didn't have too much trouble with the controls. What I really liked was the freedom and open-world aspect of the game. There seem to be no shortage of events and random things to do. The graphics are very good and the game play is addictive. Top grades on this product!
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I have had limited experience with the Burnout series. The only time I've even played a Burnout game was with a free Demo of Burn out Revenge. With the abundance of average and downright bad racing games out there, I didn't expect much of the demo, but I actually found it quite entertaining and fun. Usually I expect some sort of realism in racing games, but Burnout Revenge was the exception, after a while I found myself playing the demo more than the game that the demo was included on. As much fun as I had with the Burnout Revenge demo, I never got around to getting the full game. Then after awhile, I forgot about it all together.
A few years later I got the opportunity to get a copy of Burnout Paradise City. I was expecting more of the same as compared to Burnout revenge, and for the most part it is still the same type of game, but there are a few disappointments.
First off there is no "Crash Breaker" in Paradise. I seem to recall in the Revenge Demo, I would sometime be able to break out of a crash by a perfectly timed button press; however this feature is no longer available. Why it was taken out is beyond me, I suppose they wanted the game to be more "realistic". Secondly there is no after touch either which was also in Revenge. When you crash in Paradise the computer takes over and you are no longer in control.
Another disappointment is the extremely cumbersome and confusing menus. Whoever designed the menus needs a class in user interface design. When someone is playing a game for the first time or the first time in quite a while, the last thing they want to deal with is confusing menus making the game needlessly more frustrating; when all they want to do is to figure out how to do something. A menu design should be a simple as pressing Start or Select and scrolling down to what you want to do, it does not require much more than that and I wish game companies would realize that most of us don't care about how "cool" the menu system is. They need to stop trying so hard and get back to the basics.
Despite the negatives, Burnout Paradise is still a fun game to play. I was so turned off by the menu system, that I didn't play it again for a couple of days, but I came back to it after letting my son play it for about 20 minutes. He seemed to really enjoy it and after playing it for the second time I started to enjoy it as well.
The graphics are very well done, the first thing I thought about when I played this game on my main TV in the living room were the racing games we see in video arcades. The graphics are that good. The city that you drive in looks downright real; better than PGR3. The gas stations and repair shops all over the city are also authentic looking and the gas stations in the game even have today's inflated prices. In addition the cars YOU drive are also quite convincing in the realism department. While they are not actual licensed cars, they are still designed very well and the damage they sustain is realistic. The only area in graphics that could use improvement are the NPC cars.
The audio is also great. From the engine sounds to the sounds of screeching tires and the inevitable crashes, add a great deal of excitement to the game. Additionally, if you drive on the wrong side of the road or about to hit a passing car head on, you will hear the cars honk at you. For best results it's good to have the volume cranked up to get the best effect.
Presentation is a big part of all games and that alone determines if a game is good or bad; at least in my book. For the most part Paradise delivers. This game's presentation is quite similar to Need For Speed : Underground in which you are given free roam of the city with no blocked off areas or linear routes in actual racing. If you want to drive off a cliff, you can. In addition not only do you have to contend with traffic while you are cruising you also have to deal with them during actual events. So not only do you have to worry about beating your opponents, you also have to worry about weaving through slow traffic. Unlike PGR3, your computer controlled opponents WILL crash and are not "unwreckable". In fact one of the points of the game is to wreck your opponents.
Another fun thing about the game is that you are free to race whenever YOU want to; both during free roam as well as actual races. Similar to GTA if you just want to drive around the city wrecking other cars and doing stunts all day you can. But when you do decide to race, there are over 100 "events" you can compete in all over the city and in categories such as "Street Race", "Marked Man", "Stunt Run", and "Road Rage". All events are fun, but some are understandably more difficult than others. The presentation is done well enough to keep me interested for a while. However on a side note, I never knew cars could drive themselves. There are no drivers in your and any of the other cars in Paradise so that is pretty lame, but if you can look past that you still should be able to have fun playing.
By no means can this game be considered realistic by any stretch of the imagination. Things are way too easy to do like pressing X will allow you to perform a perfect E-brake turn every single time, and not even in PGR3 can I make a sharp turn at 120 MPH without crashing. But the important thing is that this game is fun to play for me. In the long run I do see it getting a little repetitive, but for now it keeps my son and me entertained.
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