Welcome to Paradise City, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty, or so the song goes. Though in this game there are not any girls, or people for that matter and you don’t really care about the grass, as your main love is the tarmac.
Paradise City is a drivers Mecca, no police, no pedestrians, just miles and miles of road, 250 miles in fact. Exploring all of Paradise City takes you from busy city centres through to the mountains and their treacherous roads.
Burnout is very simple in execution, you have a huge city to explore and your main goal is to achieve the Burnout Elite drivers license, but to do this you are required to race other drivers. There are no real tracks as such in Paradise City, just a start point and the finish line, how you get there is up to you, just make sure your first. At each intersection of a road are traffic lights, just stop your car and rev up to start a race, there will be a quick intermission explaining the start and finish point and then off you go. Whilst there are 120 traffic lights, there are only 8 finish lines, each one at each point of the compass and they all have points of reference like the naval base, ranch, football stadium or wind farm.
The game play that we all love about Burnout has been tweaked, and resembles Burnout 2 more than any other title. To me this is a good move as the game was getting far too confusing with all of the numerous styles of play, now if you hit a car, expect serious damage. Sometimes you may get lucky and will be able to drive away from a crash, but this will lose you precious seconds. You no longer have revenge or the ability to smash through oncoming traffic, however the rival cars tend to be just as mean, and at times just as rubbish as you, so this makes for some real exciting races.
The look of the cars and Paradise City itself is amazing, as you get the faster cars there is no slowdown and the whole place will whiz past you, the sense of speed, especially in the drivers view is fast and frantic. The slow motion crash view is truly amazing, seeing your precious car crumple up like paper in extreme detail is fun and also painful to watch. There are the usual classes of cars available to unlock from muscle cars, SUV’s, stunt cars, and Japanese sports cars.
Races are either 1 on 1 or in a group of up to 8, all you have to worry about is getting to first place. There are numerous modes available, a favourite is the run the gauntlet style Marked Man, where pretty much every car is out to get you, and they mean business, all you have to do is get the finish line, thankfully there is no time limit on this. You also have a stunt challenge, where you need to beat a set score by pulling off stunt combos using the ramps, drifting and the e-brake.
The city itself is littered with shortcuts, ramps, billboards and rival cars to takedown. There are also scrap yards to go and change your car, auto shops to repair your vehicle, gas stations to get an instant fuel charge of your Burnout meter and paint shops to get new decals on your motor. The use of these stops becomes very tactical, especially during races with the auto repair and gas stops. Mid race you are able to drive through one of these and get the required power up without losing any time or positions.
Whilst this is the best in the series and a true return to form for the Burnout games there is a small problem that just irritates more than anything else, if you do not finish a race in first place you do not have the option to race again, you have to drive back to the start line, at certain areas of the map this can mean quite a long drive to get to another piece of the action, especially when you have already found all of the extras.
There are certainly better racers on the Xbox 360 than Burnout Paradise, however for sheer multiplayer action and mayhem there isn’t anything that comes close.
