With Burnout Paradise, the fifth installment in the PlayStation 2-born series, Criterion Games is working to reinvent the franchise. The development team has built the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 title from the ground-up – it’s running on a truly “next-gen†engine, not something ported from Xbox or PlayStation 2.
The new game engine isn’t the only “new†thing about Paradise. Nope — not at all. Criterion is re-working what Burnout is, and how you play it. Traditionally, you had to click through menu after menu, choosing your game type, your course and what not before you could get behind the wheel of your kick-ass car of choice. This time around, the dev is ditching the whole menu thing – it’s simply too “last-gen†for Burnout Paradise. Like every other game these days, it seems, the newest Burnout is going open-city. What does that mean, exactly?
Imagine, for a moment, Grand Theft Auto – without the hookers, the guns and the whole unavoidable Jack Thompson thing. Burnout Paradise is simply about 1) racing, 2) crashing and 3) causing other racers to crash, while you narrowly avoid danger by snaking around an explosion-tastic disaster at the very last second. It’s probably more fair and accurate, actually, to compare the new style of Burnout to Rockstar’s other known but less popular car game: Midnight Club.
Burnout Paradise is built around a living traffic-heavy city, complete with swarming intersections, hidden paths and challenges to find. Just like Midnight Club, you drive around Paradise City, as it’s called (yes, Criterion got the name from the Guns N’ Roses song by the same name, and no, the song’s not in the game), and seek out different challenges. During the pre-E3 demo, we didn’t experience any of the different challenges, but we think it’s safe to expect the usual suspects, such as Race and Crash. It’s also probably safe to bet on a couple of new modes joining the party, too.
During our time with the demo, we simply sped around the super-busy Paradise City. The game’s city is large and like any city in the United States, it’s overflowing with traffic. Intersections are congested with cars, which means there are plenty of opportunities for spectacular crashes. When you slam into a car head-on, like in past Burnout games, the game cuts to an in-game cut-scene, showing your car contort into an un-describable twisted heap of metal. Despite minor advances, the crash physics don’t seem wildly different from preceding Burnouts, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. They’re still visually impressive and spill forth huge amounts of particle effects; a collage of debris, tires, metal scattering on screen.
Achieving a Takedown is as rewarding as always. Despite the new open-city layout in place, Paradise features the same mechanical foundation of every Burnout since Burnout 3. You want to drive as fast as possible and pass oncoming traffic – as well as any cars in front of you – as close as possible in order to gain boost, which allows you to speed even faster. And, of course, you want to get Takedowns, which you earn by causing surrounding cars to crash (without you, yourself, crashing).
Fans of the Burnout franchise from the very beginning know there’s a very clear and definable difference between the first game, Burnout, the second, and the most acclaimed third game. Over time, the series has become more and more forgiving in regards to what will trigger an accident cut-scene. In the first game, if you so much as rubbed up against a passing car, you’d spin out and smash into oncoming traffic. But by the time Burnout 3 released, you could nearly crash head-first into an oncoming car itself and continue on your way with no damage done (to your car, at least). Burnout Paradise continues down this road – it’s very forgiving and it’s very arcade-ish.
This is in part the case because the game is so fast. The game’s sense of speed is blistering and impressive. And through it all, its controls remain tight enough so you can still precisely maneuver your vehicle in and out of “Oh ****†moments with no more than quick reflexes. We imagine even those who have never played a Burnout or even a racing game will be able to pick up and play Paradise with little to no problem.
The non-linear open-city design is appreciated, despite we barely got to know it before our time was up. However, Paradise honestly feels like Burnout 3 in HD, which may not be a bad thing, but it’s not a groundbreaking one, either.
Burnout Paradise is scheduled to ship first thing in 2008, during January, so you’ll have to wait a while before you can experience it yourself, but we’ll keep you up to date on the latest. We promise.
