Welcome to Paradise, With Screeching Tires

Conventional wisdom might tell you not to mess with a winning formula—“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” is the adage. For the most part, video game developers follow this sage advice, usually trotting out six or seven mailed-in sequels before declining sales force them to spice up the formula by making it “extreme” or adding scantily clad women. Every once in a while, somebody breaks this trend and screws with a successful formula—sometimes with mixed results.

Criterion Games has made few changes to the Burnout series, a commercially successful hit that promises players the ability to drive really fast and crash into things at their leisure. For the latest installment Burnout Paradise, they’ve completely reinvented the wheel by turning the racer into a free-roaming, do-anything adventure. The experience retains the Burnout feel while pushing the gameplay somewhere it has never gone before.

Burnout Paradise takes place in Paradise City, a sprawling urban center with an attached countryside. There are no menus to flick through and no options to mess with, as everything is done from within this all-encompassing world. When you boot up the game, you’re dropped off at a conveniently located home base where you can select a car and get out onto the street. Unlike in previous Burnout titles with events selected from a menu, simply pulling up to any of the game’s 120 traffic lights and spinning your wheels triggers an event. Events include both straight races and gimmick events like “Marked Man,” in which the computer racers aggressively try to destroy your ride before you reach a certain point, or “Road Rage,” in which your task is to go on a rampage against other drivers and accrue “takedowns.”

There is an incredible number of activities to try out in this game. You can participate in any one of those 120 events, explore the beautiful city on your own time, or hunt for exhilarating jumps and shortcuts. Unlike many other “sandbox” games—in which the player isn’t bound by a linear storyline—that suffer from designers simply throwing a bunch of ideas into a pot and stirring, Burnout Paradise’s city is designed so immaculately that you’ll never once be out of range of something else to do. That’s not to say things are perfect. Since there are no menus to navigate, failing a four-minute race means you’ll be driving all the way back to the starting point if you want to restart. With so much to do, though, you’ll most likely just pick something else up and run—or perhaps drive—with it and have a blast.

The game really comes alive with its online mode, which is built for eight players. Simply press the “right” button on the directional pad, and a list of all your online friends will pop up. Another flick to the right will launch you into a multi-player session in which you can compete or cooperate on a number of fun and fast-paced modes. The game also keeps track of an immense number of stats, including highest stunt scores and fastest lap times—and it displays them frequently to keep you motivated. Reading that your online rival has set a new record time for driving the wrong way into oncoming traffic should definitely inspire you to try to do the same.

Paradise City is absolutely stunning. It’s immense and yet incredibly detailed. The game is buttery-smooth at all times and runs at twice the frame rate of most games on the market, making for an unbelievably fast ride. The camera angles in particular are impressive, always seeming to frame a spectacular crash or a vengeful takedown in just the right way. Speaking of crashes, they are absurdly overblown—glass shatters, metal shears, and pieces of your hot rod fly everywhere. It’s such a visual treat that you might find yourself driving into things just to watch your car disintegrate.

The game itself shows some signs of being over-commercialized. There are in-game ads for CompUSA, for example, despite CompUSA having shut down nationally this past summer. The in-game tipster, “DJ Atomica,” sounds like a reject from the local radio station, and the music itself is a lethal combination of Avril Lavigne and Fall Out Boy.
There isn’t a more exhilarating racing experience one can find on a console. Whether it’s landing an awesome Superjump or ramming into oncoming traffic, Burnout Paradise is one sweet ride. Grab your keys, hop online, and watch the hours pass by as you wreak havoc on unsuspecting old people driving too slowly in the fast lane.