Burnout Bikes Quasi-Review
Visually Invigorating

Today we got our hands on the 2nd free update to the critically acclaimed Burnout Paradise. It’s already been said how refreshing it is to see a company like EA offer this content away at no extra cost. Hopefully it’s something we will see carry onto other titles because the truth is this free content has kept Burnout Paradise in the limelight it deserves. Sometimes you have to ask yourself, if they charged for it would people be this favourable towards the developer and the content?

Burnout Paradise received it’s biggest overhaul to date with the expansion adding a full 24 hour night day cycle, extra vehicles namely bikes and a ton of extra features and modes that support the current world. The night/day cycle adds so much in terms of visuals to the game. Before Burnout Paradise had just been about the day and it looked gorgeous. But now, partially due to the lack of alternative atmospheric effects previously, it appears more dynamic and creates a more believable setting.

You can set the 24 hour clock to be in 24-minutes, 48-minutes, 24-hour real time, set to a specific time or to map your local time. Obviously people will pick the smaller cycles as constantly changing visuals create a more involving game. The night time might not look as good as the day but the simple fact of change is enough. Saying that, at about midday during the overcast periods the game looks stunning.

Probably the most important new feature of the update is the addition of bikes. Once your over the quirky controls and lack of boost you’ll find them to be a pleasant change. Offline you get to enjoy the 38 Burning Routes on offer. These are basically drive from a to b and it’s a real shame that the offline events don’t get anything new and exciting. It appears that this update was simply about putting the bikes into the world as they’ve left a lot of room for further expansion. Racing other bikes would be great or possibly cars as well. Even Marked Man would have been nice to see even though it would have been unfairly difficult.

Otherwise another thing you can do offline is complete the road rules but with a twist now you can do them during the day and the night, essentially doubling the amount of time it will take. Road Rules were an interesting concept but didn’t really improve the game that much and when they are on there own they kind of stand out more as a chore than a interesting mode. Nevertheless it gives you something to do offline with the bikes. The real problem with the bikes offline is that essentially all you are doing is going from A to B with nothing in between. This could have been great but with none of them involving CPU bikes or interesting goals this mode lacks the charm that came in the orginal.

Meanwhile online the bikes offer a bunch of new and exciting challenges. For 360 users it seems only yesterday when they added the timed challenges and now they’ve added 70 different online bike only challenges to further keep you busy. These are similar to the existing challenges but the bikes provide enough of a new angle on things that will make them worth doing.

The whole ragdoll driver issue has been a weird one because anyone who played Project Gotham Racing 4 will know rag-dolled drivers on bikes isn’t anything to cause a higher rating. I guess the ratings boards make a distinction between the sense of speed Burnout gives. It still seems awkward because when you crash it either resets you straight away or you disappear and just see your bike crash.

Burnout Bikes does add a lot of new content that should keep people interested until the highly anticipated new island coming to Paradise City. Unfortunately this pack seems to lay down some brilliant ground work that people can play around with for a few weeks but it has nothing substantially epic. The bikes are brilliant but offline there isn’t much you can do with them. Luckily the 24-hour cycle invigorates the visuals to the point that makes this worth picking up. Well that and the fact that it’s free and if you already have the game you have no reason why you shouldn’t be playing this right now.

Disclaimer: We called this a Quasi-Review because it’s hard to get really critical about a free DLC content pack. It might help to see this more as some brief thoughts about the new DLC pack. For this reason we will not apply a score to this review.