Stand and deliver
From big-surf beach, to downtown gridlock, Burnout Paradise sees you trying to rule the roads, as you drive around over 30 square kilometers of city streets, pulling up at traffic lights and participating in events in order to work your way through various driving licenses.The simplest of events is a straightforward race, where you and others accelerate through the streets from point A to point B, but there’s also a good sprinkling of objectives, including ‘Road Rage’, where you need to smash a set of number of cars off the road within a certain time-frame, muscling your way through the speeding pack and timing your turns to perfection in order to send them hurtling into oncoming traffic or barriers.
There are also ‘Marked Man events’ in which you need to reach a destination while other cars try and take you down before you get there and also Stunt Run’s where you need to pull off as many insane stunts as possible by drifting, spinning or leaping over ramps dotted around the city.
Like any racing game, you’ll soon have your favourite type of event, depending on whether you enjoy the racing or crashing aspect of Burnout Paradise. Personally, I drove around trying to complete every Road Rage event I could because I loved driving full pelt through the streets, with boosters on full blast, Adam Ant’s ‘Stand & Deliver’ blaring out of the TV, whilst screaming into the side of opponents with my powerful muscle car and then watching them flip, twist and spin like performing acrobats. Crashes look truly spectacular and the developer has created a real feeling of impact and power as metal hits metal.
Click for larger image
Click for larger imageSome things may have changed, but Burnout Paradise hasn’t lost any of its speed. Each race is blisteringly fast and just darn good fun to boot. Furthermore, the events encourage you to go that little bit faster and to take a gamble. If you don’t come first in an event, you lose, plain and simple. There’s no reward for coming second, so you have to do dangerous things, such as using your boost when there’s a road full of traffic or trying to take down an opponent as you skid around a sharp corner.
Aside from the main events on offer, you can have plenty of fun with the Showcase mode, which has now replaced the ‘Crash’ mode from the previous game. This can be activated at any time by hitting the left and right bumpers simultaneously and then bouncing your car about by pressing the X button and trying to crash into as many vehicles as possible to rack up a high score. Despite Criterion ditching the ‘after touch’ feature, which allowed you to significantly affect the course that you car takes on impact, the mode is still a great blast, the physics are brilliant and the crashes look spectacular as you hurtle into the side of a coach and send it spinning into a road full of traffic.
In addition, you can pick up extra boost by zipping through a petrol station forecourt, get a new paint job at the spray shop, or pull up at the junkyard to swap cars, which you’ll need to do often if you want to complete the ‘Burning Route’ events.