One thing that the Burnout series’s introductory radio station Crash FM provides is plenty of soundbites to neatly sum up its games. Burnout Revenge’s “it’s a car-crash-car world” said everything about both its priorities and the weird absence of people in its toy car destruction fantasia. Burnout Paradise has a couple of good early stabs at what its world of Paradise City promises. “Every intersection is a new adventure” it proclaims, announcing itself as “unlike any driving experience you’ve ever had”. It both is and isn’t the latter, and the former is key to why.
Burnout Paradise is centred on a series of races against turbocharged and boisterous opponents who will happily swipe you into a wall if you don’t do the same to them first. These are mixed up with even more destruction-focused contests, time trials, and challenges to cause the biggest and most costly crashes, cartwheeling a blown-out wreck around and trying to take as many other vehicles down as possible. In all of that, Burnout Paradise is very much in line with its predecessors. Indeed, the formula was already so expertly refined, and so stylised, that the leap up in the gameplay within races from the move to HD consoles doesn’t seem so big. It actually cuts down on the level of other bonuses and encouragements that are thrown at you from moment to moment.
The framework around those events, though, is utterly transformational. Previous Burnout games involved choosing events from menus. For Burnout Paradise there is nothing of the sort. Instead developers Criterion took the open-world moves of some of Burnout’s big rivals and did donuts around them before speeding off into the distance. Burnout Paradise takes place in one big city, and does so in a way which is remarkably seamless. Those events each start from a different set of lights at a different junction, those crash challenges can be triggered at any moment (with the other cars, buses etc. showing up on cue), and in between there are hundreds of yellow barriers to smash through, billboards to break, and ridiculous jumps to attempt in cinematic slow motion.
Early on I fell behind in a race and decided to quit. I searched the menus fruitlessly for a button to do so. Then I stopped the car and… that was it, a couple of seconds before it ended and transferred me immediately into looking for more secret shortcuts and ramps, right where I was. Together with the clever design of the city and its abandoned railway tracks and multi-storey car parks, it makes exploration easy and rewarding. It needs a slightly different mindset from one focused on doing the same challenge until beating it, but the encouragement to do other things generally works out as welcome. And the way that races end at eight set places in different compass directions means that it’s not too hard to find two challenges with inverse start and end points and alternate between the two, as I did with a Burning Route time trial and a race until I beat them each on my fifth attempt.
My favourite use of the new possibilities of the design is the stunt challenges. These give you under a little under two minutes to try to score as many points as possible from jumps, handbrake turns, drifts and so on, with combo multipliers from attaining big air or hitting some of those billboards. It rewards technique, knowing the city and being able to react to opportunities in equal measure, and makes for the perfect melding of Burnout with Tony Hawk. The time is just long enough to give you the chance to range around to favourite locations (the beach, the bridge with a gap to jump in the middle) without making all of the challenges around the city exactly the same. And instead of different spots having different target scores, the target score for all of them just increases each time you pass one, a brilliantly simple solution to how to scale difficulty in such an open game.
There are things that Burnout Paradise loses in making the switch to openness. For all of the winding mountain roads at the west edge of the map, where the grass is green and the views are pretty, Paradise City lacks anything like the variety of the locations around the world in Burnout Revenge. The variety of things you can do takes precedence over the variety of where you can do them. In taking away the menus, the artificiality of it all seeps through the experience in a different way as well, when the roads empty or fill as appropriate for exactly what you’re doing, other cars vanishing along with your status.
Indeed, that’s not the only way that Burnout Paradise is even more aesthetically focused than its predecessors, something neatly summed up when it comes straight out with the relevant Guns’n’Roses song before the intro is even done. It may not actually feature Axe adverts this time, but it’s even more squarely aimed at a vision of Lynx-spraying male tweendom. Events where you have to out-run crushing opponents are called ‘marked man’; there may be no people in this bizarro car-centric world but you can still get glamour girls spray-painted on your vehicle. At the same time it is a game which features Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” on the soundtrack and blanks out not just the fifth word in “hell yeah I’m the motherfucking princess” but the first one too. And renders the album title as The Best D*mn Thing. Shiny, sexist, sanitised; a playground where every intersection is a new adventure. The most concentrated and powerful Burnout experience yet.
Top of the charts for week ending 26 January 2008:
Top of the charts for week ending 2 February 2008:
Alexander Sigsworth
Haven’t played Burnout Paradise but I have played the Remaster for PlayStation 4 (though the gameplay is the same). It was a Christmas present, so my license was issued 25/12/2018. I remember that year well, because it was the year I graduated, so I was looking forward to finally having a rest – and hearing that menu music, like drops of sun, immediately set the tone. Every time I start playing it now, that track immediately puts me back there in that initial serenity of it when it was all new and shiny and Paradise City was mine to discover. I really love this game. It really is just such a pleasurable experience.