The Burnout series has gone through highs and lows. Arguably the first two games weren’t much when you compare them to Burnout 3 and Burnout Revenge. You could also argue that although Revenge was on the 360 it was a port plain and simple. So with that in mind, welcome to the world of Burnout Paradise the first true ‘next gen’ Burnout game.
Today gamers around the world can download the demo and enjoy what could only be called love at first sight. You’ll load it up and after it takes a picture of you (if you have the Vision Camera) you get thrown into a small section of Paradise City. Before you ask, yes it is a free roaming game and yes this is the same mechanic that has made other driving games simply weak. But Burnout has swayed me into liking this idea. Mainly because of the stuff you can do. Take Need For Speed for example it’s a good game, nevertheless the free roam sections were boring and just had you following what was basically a Sat-Nav around the city. Burnout gives you ramps, ramps and more ramps to jump over and believe me when I say that you’ll want to do this time and time again. You would think this could get boring but it has this odd trick thing to it. You’ll always want to beat your highest air time or most barrel rolls. I have found myself going around the city, parts of the map I already know, finding another shortcut that leads to another ramp for me to try and beat my old records.
Before you panic, there are challenges but you do have to drive to each one. In the demo there are only 3 challenges which are spread out and without an instant retry, it means you have to drive back to the start point every time you fail or wish to restart. Apparently in the full game there will be challenges at every traffic light, so finding a challenge won’t be a problem.
Once you’ve wrapped up all of these challenges, hit all special jumps and completed all the other little mini-missions around the city, there is online mode. Yes I am talking about the demo. Up to 4 players can join in and try 3 more specific online challenges. The one challenge that stands out involved us working as a team, while one of your mates attempts to barrel roll over the top of every other player in the game. We then took turns to do this until we all were checked off. This was good fun because barrel rolls can be challenging, especially when you’ve only been playing the game for ten minutes. The other challenges weren’t much but we did them anyway as it was a nice stop gap between taking each other down and beating each others records.
Here is a scenario. You want to play your friend at a co-op game you could always just bring up the guide, go into your friends list, wait for it to load, select a friend, wait for it to load, select invite to game, give it a second and then mash the B button to get back into the game. Or you could do it the Burnout way and that’s press right on the d-pad, select a friend, they say yes and your playing. It’s as simple as that, and this is all seamless within the game, no loading, no lobbies, just invite, play, crash. It’s a basic feature but it really helps streamline the whole online process. Something that I believe should be in every game.
I could carry on about how nice the specific online challenges are or how brilliant the graphics look when you crash but part of the magic of Burnout is doing these things for the first time, so I won’t spoil them for you. Basically the demo is free and at that price it’s worth a look. After all it is a free ticket to Paradise, a name that it fully deserves.
Look out for the full game coming 25th January (EU) and 22nd January (NA)
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