PC Review: Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box
by Sam Naylor on February 11, 2009 at 9:58 am
Burnout Paradise was one of the best-received games of 2008 on the consoles, and is currently hailed as one of the best racing games this generation. A year later, and the game has had a multitude of downloadable content, all substantial and mostly free. This is aggregated in “The Ultimate Box” released for PS3, Xbox 360, and most crucially, PC. This is the first time the series has come to PC, but is the experience truly “Ultimate”? Can the game live up to the majesty of Burnout 2? Hit the jump to find out.
The experience of starting up Burnout on the PC for the first time was, sadly, tedious at best. The game requires a lengthy sign-up process and, worst of all, an unskippable introduction movie. Despite this, however, the player is handed a supercar and then told “go have fun, champ!”
A particularly hard offer to refuse, might I add. The sprawling city is fully open from the start, and because the game appears to work on the principle of “give the player a bloody fast car, and let them progress into mind-meltingly fast cars,” one is compelled to, well, drive. This is the first racing game I have played in a long while that knows its audience: speed freaks. The type of people who will enjoy Burnout are the type of people who love to unlock the fastest car in the game and find a very straight road — Criterion have provided in both categories.
As I’ve said before, the car progression is great. The starting car is, compared to the other cars, very basic, but compared to many racing games, it’s a monster. Not only that, but one of the two bikes you are given at the beginning is astoundingly fast. I was taken aback by the sheer feeling of speed that this bike gave me. Likewise, the cars become suitably epic, reaching speeds so great it’s difficult to distinguish between tarmac and solid wall. Speaking of walls, I’ll come back to the crashes.
The other aspect that Criterion have provided on is the gameplay map. Despite it being completely open-world, the area is expertly designed, with sections designed for straight-line cruising, massive stunt runs, and lengthy country routes with plenty of drift-heavy corners. Each road is unique, and ultimately fun to race along. While participating in a race, the player has complete choice on how to get to the goal.
I found that even though it might be a little longer distance-wise, taking a route that I enjoyed (and therefore knew well) could give me the edge in a race. It’s a rare thing that, with such a large world, one can develop such a fondness for the area. Of course, the motorway is one of the best routes when you’re not in a race — it goes around in a big circle, and is generally devoid of traffic. Naturally, taking your fastest car around here is an undeniable thrill.
The crashes, then. The thing that brought many to the Burnout series in the past, they return in all of their glory from earlier titles. A high speed crash can be as fun as the driving itself — the camera angle becomes as dramatic as possible, everything slows down, and the spectacle begins. Shards of metal fly in all directions, the crumple zones of the car compact down completely, and the car, in many cases, is launched high into the air. This is the car equivalent of heads exploding in Fallout 3.
Of course, this also mostly applies to the version released last year, but the new content is just as well polished as the full game — the bikes are different enough to be refreshing, but easy enough to pick up, and the weather effects and day-to-night cycles add extra character to the sprawling streets of Paradise City. The “Party Pack” adds single-controller multiplayer fun, in a similar vein to crash mode of the earlier games. Each player plays the same run trying to beat the score of the others in stunt, speed, and strength categories (points, time, cars smashed off the road). It’s a welcome addition, but nothing worth shouting from the rooftops for.
Online play is seamless — a flurry of players appear in your city when you go online, and there are plenty of game types to play with them. A neat feature of playing online is that when you are taken down (that is, rammed off of the road), a snapshot of you is taken by your webcam. This mugshot is sent to the player who took you down; often these pictures are hilarious.
The game runs at a fantastic framerate even at extremely high speed, and it looks fantastic, even on medium settings. Of course, on high settings it looks particularly great — the city and the cars are colourful and have a realistic shine and bloom effect, unlike many games that have been released recently. The game also scores big points for supporting plenty of controllers — just plug it in and set the buttons to your liking. Too many games only support the 360 controller for Windows; Burnout gets a special mention for even working with my Sixaxis PS3 controller.
It’s a rare thing to see a truly fun racing game, especially on the PC. Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box is just what a Burnout game should be: fast fun. The adrenaline rush from playing Burnout Paradise is matched by few others, and thanks to controller support and the extra content, this is surely the definitive version of the game despite the slightly rough beginning moments.
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Related Posts:
- Burnout DLC now available on PC
- Complete Burnout: Paradise Coming to PSN
- Burnout Paradise Bikes Update
- New Game Releases: Feb. 1 – Feb. 7
- Burnout Paradise Demo Comes Next Week
- Criterion Announces Toy Cars for Burnout Paradise
- Criterion Announces Carson Hotrod for Burnout Paradise
- Burnout: Paradise Demo Impressions
2 Comments » |
on February 11, 2009 3:47 pm
do you mean Burnout 3 takedown? to me, that seemed the most popular one of the series.
on February 12, 2009 12:31 am
Burnout 3 might have been the most popular, but Burnout 2 was the best.