Burnout: Paradise Demo Impressions
by Roly Reyes on December 31, 2007 at 3:53 pm
When Burnout: Paradise first hit my radar I was cautiously optimistic. Burnout is one of the few racing series that I still care about and I figured Paradise was going to be nothing more than a reincarnation of Burnout: Revenge because, well, it’s EA. Boy, did Criterion prove me wrong. This is them at their finest – taking risks, innovating, and shutting people up.
The first time the Paradise demo boots there’s a 15 second load, give or take a few, and from that point forward there are no loading breaks to be found at any point in time beyond the initial load. I may be mistaken but I believe that this is a feat that has yet to be completely implemented in an open world game (I’m looking at you and your tunnels THAW).
Immediately you’re greeted by the informative (albeit annoying) DJ Atomica and are instructed to get the engine running on the rusted piece of junk that has just been handed to you. Then there you go, free to do pretty much whatever you want throughout a fraction of Paradise City that is handed to you.
The first thing that is as clear as day is that this iteration of Burnout has done away with menus altogether. Wanna go online? Press right on your d-pad and invite some friends over. Wanna start a race? Pull RT+LT (or R2+L2) at an intersection, and you get a little information about the path of carnage that you’re about to traverse, and off you go.
Within the little bit of Paradise that you’re granted, you can do a stunt run, 2 races, a new crash mode, and 9 online challenges.
As far as the races go, it’s classic Burnout in all its traffic check, takedown glory. Stunt run, as one would imagine, is a timed event in which you are to chain burnouts, jumps, barrel rolls, and anything else that resembles an action that would be supremely illegal should you go out and try it in your Ford F-150.
The jury is out on the new crash mode, Showtime, which isn’t available in the demo. I guess they figured it would take away too much from the actual game.
As far as the online challenges go, I can’t speak too subjectively of them as I couldn’t get a group going, but for what it’s worth it seems like Criterion is going with the ‘everything is more fun in co-op’ mindset. Paradise also includes competitive events as well in the form of races, stunt runs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had more up their sleeve.
Paradise is shaping up to be the best racing game since super simmy Forza 2. If you need me you can find me here impatiently waiting for the January 22nd release of Burnout: Paradise. Hopefully by then I can find something wrong with it.
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6 Comments » |
on December 31, 2007 4:31 pm
If I buy this game, I’m buying it USED.
Why? In-game advertisements.
Look, they asked for an extra $10 for games because they’re supposedly so much more difficult/costly to make now, fine, we gave them that. There’s no justification for putting REAL WORLD advertisements in my games. I play games to ESCAPE reality, not look at more advertisements for ford trucks and body spray.
And no, I don’t care how well “it fits with the theme” of the game, that’s no excuse. Whether you find the APPEARANCE of them annoying or not is beside the point, they’re making MONEY by ADVERTISING to us in our games. That’s complete BS and I refuse to suppport it.
on January 1, 2008 3:22 am
if i was really into video games, id totally buy this game for the fact that i LOVE racing.
the game sounds hella cool, nice wrting by the way.
on January 1, 2008 7:36 am
What about the new ultra realistic crashes?
on January 1, 2008 3:42 pm
The new crash scenes are pretty awesome. I have a feeling that it’s physics based, but there were quite a few times were I felt as though I was watching a crash I had done a few minutes. Still looked, neat though.
Most of the time spent playing the demo was spent futzing around the world, going fast, and crashing into things as fast as I could.
on January 1, 2008 9:06 pm
The crashes are some of the best…love the crumpling cars.
Online is the best bit about it Roly…seamless on the PS3 and no trouble finding strangers to play against. Just select “Open” and they’re in.
There are problems though – not being able to restart a race if you don’t finish…you have to drive back to the starting position.
on January 17, 2008 6:10 pm
Played the demo and was very unimpressed. For starters, I really don’t see what the open city adds to the game (unless it’s nothing). I definitely prefer simple and fast menus to stupid driving around. The fact that such an open city is now possible doesn’t mean it should be implemented. Change for change’s sake is plain wrong.