Burnout Paradise

Burnout Paradise
Take me down to the paradise city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty...
Genre(s): Racing Rating(s): ESRB: E10+ Platform(s): Xbox 360 PlayStation 3 Xbox One Playstation 4 Nintendo Switch Release Date: Original January 22, 2008 Remastered: Xbox One/PS4 March 16, 2018 Nintendo Switch June 19, 2020 Engine: RenderWare Developer(s): Criterion Games Publisher(s): Electronic Arts Country: United Kingdom Series: Burnout Predecessor: Burnout Dominator

Burnout Paradise is the 7th entry in the Burnout series released in 2008. the game later received a remaster that came out in 2018 on Xbox One and PS4 and in 2020 for the Nintendo Switch

Gameplay

Burnout Paradise breaks away from the previous entries by giving players a completely open world to drive around in and partake in various events that are scattered throughout the map. Various cars and other vehicles can be unlocked. It is the first Burnout game to include online multiplayer, which includes various modes.

Why It's a Summer in Paradise

1. Phenomenal soundtrack featuring artists such as Brand New, Guns N' Roses, Killswitch Engage, Alice in Chains, and Sugarcult
   • It also includes songs from the prior Burnout games, which is also a nice touch.
2. Gorgeous visuals that are still great by today's standards, in fact it's can be seen as one of the best looking game of the franchise.
3. The DLC's especially Big Surf Island are amazing with Big Surf Island giving an additional island to explore
4. It brings the Burnout franchise into open world for the first time and it works great with many places to explore and it merges the classic Burnout formula with the open world adding an extra layer of difficulty and creativity to races
5. Outside of races there are still things to do such as Road Rules, Showtime, getting all Burnout Paradise signs, finding hidden areas, etc.
6. Depending on which cars you use, you might have one that is for example balanced, strong but slow, or fast but hard to control adding a layer of strategy to the choice of vehicle.
7. The gameplay is intense and fun, and it had open-world gameplay with unlimited fun.
8. Because of the aforementioned open world, the races themselves are also more open, with multiple routes and shortcuts to take.
9. Realistic, brutal and satisfying crashes.
10. First in the franchise to be released for PC and it runs very well.
11. Other vehicles other than cars can be driven in races for the first time since Burnout 2. You can even ride motorbikes.
12. Criterion Games has remastered this game for release on PS4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and PC in 2018. Unlike Activision, EA did not add microtransactions into the game and bundled all DLC for free.
13. Paradise City has a lot to do, such as billboards to smash, shortcuts to open, insane jumps to take, the list goes on.
14. Stunt events are new to the series, where you earn points for driving like a maniac!
15. Various multiplayer modes such as Cops 'n' Robbers, races, stunt runs, etc.
16. Some features, like the motorcycles and day/night cycles were added in via content updates.
17. Insane sense of speed. Nothing beats flying through the streets at high speeds while narrowly avoiding traffic!
18. The introduction of Repair Shops which can be used mid-race to mitigate the chance of totaling your car, Gas Stations which can provide an instant Boost top-up and Respray Shop which can change between car paint like gloss, metallic and pearlescent.
19. Great engine sounds (thanks to NFS). #Especially the Watson 25 V16 Revenge with its Porsche Carrera GT' (Project Code 980)'s V10 engine sound from the Black Box and Autolog era of the Need for Speed series, and the Hunter Racing Oval Champ with the BMW M3 (E46) GTR (sort of) engine sound.
20. Cool modding community which worked on a Big Surf Island port for PC, called Vanity Pack (before Remastered).

Bad Qualities

1. Inconsistent Difficulty: regardless of your license class and depending on the Stunt Run, Road Rage, Marked Man, or Race event you choose, the difficulty can range from insultingly easy to insanely difficult.
2. The "Ultimate Box" from Steam lacks a good majority of the DLC, which was only accessible on Origin and on consoles before they were delisted. Fortunately, cracked versions can be included with DLC unlockers which unlocked all DLC cars, so PC players can finally drive the DLC cars they always wanted, free of charge.
3. The original PC release also lacked the paid DLC options Cops and Robbers and Big Surf Island. This was partially remedied by the Vanity Pack 2.0 mod, but that mod's version of Big Surf Island has limits. Thankfully, Burnout Paradise Remastered included all the DLC ever released plus the two aforementioned DLCs (minus the Time Savers Pack), meaning PC players can now finally enjoy the game in full.
4. Physics aren't that great, but it's not a racing sim or a realistic driving game so advanced physics are not required.
5. No way to instantly restart events, you have to drive all the way back to the starting point if you fail! Thankfully, however, an option to restart was added in an update and has been maintained in Remastered.
6. Similar to BeamNG.drive, a car crash/driving simulator released by five years later in 2013 and on Steam in 2015, the cars have no driver(s) unlike the bikes. However, you might think that the former are ghost vehicles or remote-controlled because of that.
7. Certain features, such as auditory (like car engine sounds) and visual ones from the unpatched game on consoles were altered between versions 1.1 to 1.6.
8. The last gen version's (along with the original PC version) servers were shut down first thing on August 1, 2019. Online functions are non-functional for the original versions of the game, which was also delisted from digital stores as of January 2018, meaning those players can no longer get the Jansen P12 Diamond (which can be unlocked by completing all 500 Freeburn challenges) or drive the Hunter Olympus and Nakamura Rai-Jin Turbo (which are both online exclusive cars) due to lacking servers.
9. With a price of US$49.99 at launch, the Nintendo Switch port of Remastered is unreasonably pricey, in addition to being unfair to the pricing for other platforms.
10. Generic-looking billboards in the remastered version, though PC players can mod the game to fix that.
11. Stellar Entertainment nerfed the airtime for the Jansen Toy 88 Special so it wouldn't fly as far.
12. Possibly due to expired licenses, “Finger on the Trigger” by Never Heard of It and “Everyone has Their Secrets” by Showing Off to Thieves are removed from the Remastered version, which doesn’t make sense because both songs are credited and have a .swf file in the executable.
13. No speedometer at all. Why this was not included is anyone's guess.
    • Thankfully, there are mods that add one to the game.
14. Post-version 1.1, everything has been downscaled or downright removed. From crash filters (when you crash, the screen will go black and white, but leaving the red colors), to physics, to even Impact Time and its ambiences, which people found scary. And that slowly removes Burnout Paradise's "what was the great stuff about Burnout since B3", which is a lighthearted game about going absolutely bonkers in a car, running on pure, unleaded, nightmare fuel.

Reception

Reception for Burnout Paradise was very positive, holding an 88 for the Xbox 360 version on Metacritic, and an 87 for both the PS3 and PC versions. The open-world design and sense of speed were widely praised in particular. However, as Criterion had been reduced to development support for other projects (like Star Wars Battlefront 2015), the future of the Burnout series is currently in question.

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