No Trouble in Paradise

Burnout 3: Takedown is my favourite racing game for years, the brutality of the takedowns and velocity of the racing filled me with so much adrenaline and the crash mode lead to hours of fun. How did Burnout Paradise stack up against its older brother?

Brilliantly. Burnout Paradise is outstanding. There is so much to do and so many ways to do it. Burnout is a racing game at heart but it doesn’t lend itself to the boring clichés of the genre. It takes everything from its predecessors and builds upon them and refines them all into one neat, super-fast package. It truly is one of the best games in the Burnout franchise.

DJ Atomika acts as your guide through Paradise City, playing terrible indie and pop punk songs as you drift and jump on ramps and busy intersections, chasing after your next unlock. There are a lot of game modes in Paradise city, and for me the stand out is Road Rage.

Road Rage has been a mainstay for the Burnout series for as long as races have. Its objective is to crash into your opponents to wreck their cars, and there are so many possible ways to do this. Will you barge them into an oncoming vehicle, grind them into the railing or ram into the side of them hoping that they flip over due to the sheer force you – and your nitrous – are hitting them with?

There are other game modes that riff on this idea too, Marked Man has you race from point A to point B whilst being hunted down by two incredibly strong muscle cars out to take you down as brutally as possible and stop you from getting there. The races are self-explanatory and the Burning Route mode is Burnouts’ equivalent of a time trial. There’s also a mode called Stunt Run, which tasks you with achieving the highest amount of points by jumping and boosting and grabbing collectibles in a short time limit.

Upon completing races and burning routes you will unlock different vehicles that will drive around the open world until you chase them down and wreck them, allowing them to be taken to the junkyard where you can switch your vehicle to them. There are lots of cars to unlock and even more downloadable ones, ranging from toy cars to DeLoreans and back to toy DeLoreans.

There are lots of collectibles in Burnout Paradise. Billboards, super jumps, yellow gates and special edition vehicles are dotted about Paradise City, which all relate to certain trophies and unlockables. These are also great for the completionists, who have 400 gates to find scattered around the city.

This is also the first Burnout to feature bikes, you can’t enter all the game modes with them but they are very fun to ride around the free world in, and

have challenges associated with them too. The vehicles also have better names than in previous Burnout titles. What used to be Muscle 2 is now the Hunter Cavalry, and that improvement is a very welcome one. The cars also have different classes; Stunt, Speed and Aggression. These determine how you get your Nitrous boost, be it by performing stunts, driving fast or taking down other drivers. Each is good for different game modes but I tend to love the Aggression class myself as I play this game to crush my foes.

Paradise also allows you to rule roads by beating the fastest time taken to get from one side to the other, you can also jump into ‘Showtime’ where you must crash into as many vehicles as possible to cause maximum damage. Achieving both of these on a road will allow you to rule it, and boy is it cool to have your own kingdom.

Overall, Burnout Paradise is my favourite racing game at the moment and has been for a few years now. Split/Second came close, but nothing matches the sheer enjoyment I get from the Burnout franchise.

Conclusion

‘If you have no friends – play single player. If you have friends – get the party pack. No matter what, you are going to have a lot of fun. Take my word on it’.

9/10