Burnout Paradise

 Arcade racers are my favorite kind of racers, nothing beats the adrenaline-fueled or reckless driving not caring if the next corner will serve as a straightener, a crashing point, or both; that's what gaming is all about. Burnout Paradise pleases me with its approach, it's an arcade racer by heart, and it's not afraid to admit that, actually, it practically shouts proudly for everyone to know it. The controls pretty much tell you that, to help cornering a simple push at the break button and you'll start drifting, and you have complete control over it, increasing or decreasing the degree of the inclination, depending on the curve, more open or more closed. The car is perfectly controllable using the keyboard, I generally prefer using a controller on most games of this nature, since an analogic stick gives much more precision than the digital-fashioned keyboard; not the case here, the keyboard will put you in total control and rare are the occasions where you'll have any reason to complain about it. One of these rare occasions though is when you crash, roll or whatever, and ends up facing a wall or anything solid, upon driving forward and trying to exit laterally the car generally centralizes even not completely perpendicular to the wall and the reverse gear will be your only option, with a high time cost.

The fine lads from Criterion don't want you to lose much time customizing your ride, so the options for colors or any general aspect is kept to a minimum. For choosing a car and start rolling the streets of Paradise city three cumulative stats are embedded with each vehicle, they are speed, boost and strength; to have a more precise idea of how a car handles only practice will really tell. The cars each have a distinct type of boost, which is the major difference between them, the boosts will be defined generally by the car's most excelling stat, like a car with a boost fit for stunt, or aggressive, to help take down targets. Controlling your car won't pose any problem at all, but the camera might take a while to get used, especially since there are only two choices, the first-person view seen through the front end of the vehicle, and the rear view close to the back end; the problem lies on the rear view, more diverse options would be welcome, like the camera more distant from the rear and one with a raised view, for when driving at the sloped streets of paradise city and you can't see what's coming at you.

Paradise City is a wonder to behold, there are numerous roads, streets, pathways, bridges, off-road paths, shortcuts, alleys; there's also lots of cars wandering around that might cause you more trouble than anything else, but still part of something vibrant, and ultimately beautiful. Paradise City has never been this pretty graphically, taking advantage of PC's dynamism when it comes to resolution and quality filters. For an open world roaming game it's not too costly on your graphics card, even at high resolution and maximum quality, though it is required a rather recent card to handle it well, but nothing out of this world. It seems developers really appreciate slow-motion scenes because every time you crash -- and it will happen quite a lot -- your misery is put to prove in slow-motion glory, hundreds of cybernetic steel deforming, creating a scrapped mass on your screen, only to seconds later put you back on the action; sometimes it's interesting seeing all those well-made effects but for a fast-paced racing game like this it's such a sudden break of action that I don't think it's worth it.

The objectives you have to accomplish are found scattered around most corners and crossroads in the fictional city, just stop by any of them hold break and start accelerating to trigger the event. There's regular races; market man events where you're the target and bullies try to take you down, it's up to you to reach the destination before you're torn into pieces; road rages where the streets are transformed into a battlefield and the cars into war tanks, the number of take downs is presented and the player must acquire that number of enemies' cars taken down to succeed; and stunt run to reach a certain score by doing crazy jumps, spins, barrel rolls, etc. As a more distinctive task there's the Burning Route, each car has its own challenge and it's exclusive to that one car only, it's a race against the clock from one point to the other, upon beating it, an upgraded version of the car used gets sent to the player's junk yard -- which is where the cars collected are kept. New cars can also be obtained by taking down rivals' cars who might cross you around the city. What you can do while not racing impress and deserves attention, many billboards to be broken, yellow grids hiding shortcuts waiting to be found and ramps with insane jumps for you to make. Finding all that is incredibly satisfying and rewarding.

The ways the open world is used says much about Burnout Paradise, Criterion tries hard not to make it just another useless sandbox racing full of useless pathways, so in normal racing they merely give you the starting point and the finishing point, it's up to you to go find your own path to reach the destination. Don't like going through the shortest route full of curves, small streets and difficult shortcuts? Just pick the high-speed roads taking a longer route but maintaining the speed at all times, pick the fitting car for whatever style fits you best, maybe surprising your rivals that took one route or the other and winning the event. On this they have succeeded. What they haven't succeeded is that there isn't much diversity in them, the event is started at the crossroad which holds the event and the finishing point is one of the eight major locations in Paradise city, each in a cardinal point. Though it has its strong points, after a while the preferred route will be in your head for each bit of the city, and difficulty is relative because it depends on other factors as well, like traffic and how far you are in the game.

The online mode is fun, though it suffers from a recurring problem from the main game, the badly-designed menus. When entering a server you and a number of human players that range from 2 to 8 start roaming Paradise City doing whatever comes to mind, when the host decides to do so, he triggers events for the players to complete, which can be co-operative or ***** with a large number of tasks for the players to compete, so it's a nice system that revolves around doing stuff other than racing. It's worth noting that Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box for the PC features many nice downloadable contents like new cars, motorcycles, new objectives exclusive for bikes that mainly revolves around races against the clock with checkpoints and going from point A to point B, though it's a nice way to keep the player going when it's all said and done. Two downloadable content packs are notably not included, the Cops and Robbers pack and more importantly the Island Pack, which also adds new events, challenges, smashes, billboards and jumps and would make an excellent addition.

Burnout Paradise is a fine-crafted arcade racing game, it doesn't go without a number of little annoyances and small flaws, but overall this game achieves a lot and can definitely say it has brought something new to the racing genre, even if not something ground-breaking. The gigantic Paradise City might scare the unprepared but nothing that some hours into the game wouldn't fix. One of the finest racing experiences this generation has to offer in its ultimate version, along with many interesting downloadable content packs that only add to the overall value, if you haven't tried it out yet, this is the time and version to make up for the lost opportunities.