NIDZUMI+

Every year we see just another sequel, just another remake with a few extra features. Nearly every franchise has been caught doing it but don’t see this as a bad thing although there is only so long you can iterate on a standard formula. So in a space over-saturated by the same old game year after year, the folks down at Criterion have done an excellent job in both not following this gaming cliche and by making a damn good game in the progress.

The first time you play Burnout Paradise you might not like it. Actually I’ll be honest the first thing I said was ‘What have they done to my Burnout?!’. Its weird because its not your set race after set race type of experience that you normally get from a Burnout title. Then you play it a bit more, figure out a bit more, unlock a bit more, find a bit more and each time by doing so you’ll fall in love a bit more. Let me explain.

Burnout Paradise is open world. Now I know what your thinking (something like ‘What have they done to my Burnout?!?’) but this is a good thing as the city design, cleverly named Paradise City, is excellent. It has so many hidden shortcuts, ramps and back alleys for you to do stunts off and this alone will keep you busy for hours. There are Burnout Billboards all around the city that have to be collected, again normally this is a bad thing because nobody likes collecting missions but the billboards always involve jumping through them and they are so big that you can’t miss them.

If you want to start an event in Paradise City you just pull up at a intersection slam on the triggers and bang, your straight into an event. whether it be your basic point to point Race, your still insanely fun Road Rage or the blindingly fast Burning Routes. There are also two new event types to the series this time around. One of them comes in the form of Marked Man, combining Race’s point to point aspect with people aggressively trying to take you down. The other is called a Stunt Run, which lets you loose in the arena that is Paradise City to get the best stunt run combo you can. Everyone of these you complete gets you another point on your license and you work your way up through the licenses until you finish all 120+ events in the City.

If that doesn’t do it for you then you can play ‘Road Rules’ by either racing from one end of the street to the other end in order to beat a time or by going into Showtime. Showtime is this Paradise’s answer to Crash mode and you can start it at any time, even in a race. Well I say answer to Crash Mode but its not the same, but it is still fun as long as you can get over the fact that you don’t really have a Crash mode that is true to the series but the rumors are that this could happen with DLC.

The Online is where Burnout excels. To play most games online with your friends over Xbox you have to bring in the clunky Dashboard and untangle the menus until you’ve sent your invite. With Burnout Paradise you press right on the D-pad and you’ve got a list of friends to invite. If they like you and say yes then seamlessly they will appear in your game, no lobby’s, hardly any loading, nothing. When your in a game you can play out Races but the best thing to do is all the Challenges, all 350 of them. These will range from simple challenges like meet up at a certain point to difficult ones like flat-spin 360 degrees over everyone else. There is a lot of fun to be had online and the fact that the menus are kept out of the way make the transition from online to offline perfect.

Although I just said perfect, Burnout falls a bit shy. Like I mentioned at the start you might not know what to do at the start and I’m sure that a few people have been put off by this, but this is just a minor problem because as soon as you know what to do you’ll be flying all over the city. Other problems come in the form of no retry if you have failed an event, although you’ll find something else to do pretty quickly. The other problem is it does get a bit repetitive as there are only 5 main modes that are all immensely fun but a few more modes wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Criterion could have taken Burnout Revenge and simply given it a few new modes and upped the graphics. They didn’t, but what they did do was reinvigorate the franchise and restore my faith in Open-World Gameplay.

9.5/10