Burnout Paradise (Video Game Review)
Originally written on October 17, 2008.
Burnout Paradise
Racing games tend to camp out on two extremes of a difficulty spectrum, which often makes them very hard for me to enjoy. On one end of the spectrum, there are piss easy and unremarkable romps through juvenile cookie cutter track designs that lose any sense of fun because no amount of skill is required as long as you understand which button it is that makes the car move. Polar opposite to this are racing simulators, which are so nuanced and complex that you could spend an eternity attempting to master the game and never actually win half of the races. In my experience, the single exception to the racing genre has been the Burnout series. I have fond memories of Burnout 3 in particular, what with all the high velocity scrap metal flying everywhere. There are games that encourage reckless driving, and then there is Burnout that dedicates entire game modes to it.
Burnout Paradise is the series’ first foray into the shiny next generation. It was released around the Christmas 2007 area, but I’ve only been able to play it for the last couple of weeks when a friend of a friend of mine stole a copy from Toys’R’Us and left it in the dairy cooler (he also left a PS3 dualshock controller in there too, so I thank him for that as well.) Aside from the reliable vehicular mayhem the Burnout series has been known for, Paradise kicks it up a notch by giving us an open world to explore. Progress in the game is kept by means of a licensing system. They start you off with a trainer’s permit and a rust bucket, and fancy cars and prestige are just grinding the same dozen or so races away.
I’ll admit, open world games tend to confuse me. I can see and appreciate the appeal of options and variety, but I’d much rather have expectations to meet, even if they are relatively obtuse. In Burnout Paradise, there is no story to trudge through. There is no specific objective you need to meet. It’s the type of game where the satisfaction in beating it, a satisfaction I’ve grown up on with adventure and role-playing games, is completely nonexistent. The type of victory I tend to cherish in games can be declared in Burnout Paradise if you turned the game on successfully.
If Burnout Paradise weren’t intermittently fun, there would be little incentive to grind events for license upgrades. The fun bits all consist of wanton destruction though, and if you’ve seen one high speed wreckage, frankly you’ve seen them all. While it may sound like I’m understating the enjoyment of watching glossy metal heaps pirouette through the air, understand that every time this happens to you, the control is seized and you’re forced to watch what’s left of your car’s chassis slam into pillars and buildings. You’d be inhuman to think this isn’t entertaining, but you’d also be inhuman to claim that this doesn’t wear your patience down to a bloody stump because these sections often occur several times a minute for several seconds. When you do more slow motion twisted metal ballet than actual racing, something has gone wrong.
When immense frustration has taken its toll on you, simply driving around town is both therapeutic and inspiring. To the game’s credit, exploration of the open world is encouraged through deliberately placed gates and billboards to drive through, as well as the liberal placement of ramps that line most every road. The most fun to be had is found by driving around and seeing what there is to jump off of. Again, all of which is available from minute one, so there is really no consequence to anything you do.
There are three types of cars in Burnout Paradise. Speed cars which take you from point A to point B as fast possible while avoiding the many Point C’s (that’s C for crash, by the way). Aggression cars for the bullies who like hogging three lanes and forcing everyone caught in the wake into a ditch, and Stunt cars that are optimized for rolling and jumping and all sorts of fun stuff that while heavily advertised, never seems to happen when I’m playing. Combined with the event types, a “right tool for the right job” philosophy is clearly at work here. And if you somehow happened to miss that fact, the incredibly annoying DJ Atomica is all too happy to fill your ear with how stupid you are for driving an aggression type car in a race.
Providing you are driving the right car for the right event, the game becomes incredibly easy. My favourite mode of Burnout 3 was Road Rage, an event where the game tells you how many rival cars you need to break, and then sets you on your way until you either run out of time or break your own car. In Paradise, driving what I like to call the “Fuck You Mobile,” which is actually any aggression class auto, during a Road Rage event results in the game giving you so many points that you might mistake it for feeling sorry for you. A take down target as high as fifteen actually required skill to meet in Burnout 3, but I managed to hit triple digits in Paradise before I got bored and ended the event of my own volition.
Conversely, races range in difficulty from sadistic to super-sadistic. Not because they are particularly challenging, but because victory is often one cheap unavoidable crash out of reach. You‘ll often crash mere yards from the finish line, only to watch the game mock you by granting first through seventh place to the people who crawled past you as the camera was enjoying watching you skid on your roof in the opposite direction oh so much. I suppose I could also bitch about how annoying it is to chart a course to triumph at speeds in excess of mach thirty-eight, but I’ve already written far too much about this game as it stands.
Paradise is rather bipolar in that there are sporadic moments of great signature Burnout fun in what strikes me as glorified nothing. What the player wants to do and what the game wants to do don’t often go hand in hand, so the game responds by frustrating you into submission. Had I played the game casually as opposed to combatively, I might have had a more favourable opinion of it. But this consideration can only excuse so many of the games faults. I used to think all racing games were required by law to have a speedometer, so the absence of it in Paradise strikes me as a rather curious omission. Give it a shot, but I won’t blame you if decide to pawn it off after a week or two.
Review based on PS3 version.
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