Looking to play a good arcady racing game

Hey all! I've been having this weird itch to play a mindless racing game and I've noticed that Burnout Paradise and Need For Speed Heat is on sale currently on PSN I haven't played entries on either franchise since PS2. What do y'all recommend to pick up? Thanks!

Burnout Paradise is kinda divisive in some ways. I think it's one of the all time great racing games, but there are certainly people that don't click with the structure of it.

I haven't played NFS: Heat, but it seemed to at least be better received than most of the recent NFS games.

Burnout Paradise is great fun until you have to navigate the UI or you lose a race and have to drive half a city all over again. It's not a very friendly game from the outside. I don't know. Of the two, I think Paradise is more fun moment to moment, but Heat might make better decisions by a modern standard. Heart or functionality is what it comes down to.

I'm one of the people that thought the open world kinda hurt Burnout, but still enjoyed Paradise for a while.

Dirt 5 is pretty good. Made by the same team that did Motorstorm and Drive Club.

Am I missing something. Why do people go ga ga over burn out paradise but not ga ga or give the same honor to games like Forza horizon fast and furious edition. That's the only one I really played but I only played paradise past a bit of the tutorial. From what I gather from jeff and the fans on this site, paradise is something to be placed on a pedestal. I agree that it's that good, seeing the potential even playing for my short time. But, I never see people give credit for Forza being kinda similar. Is it cause Forza copied the tone, or is it cause of paradise's lay-back tone. Is Forza too...commercial and serious? Forza kinda oozes were doing this cause its focus tested well, and paradise oozes something different cause we're having a blast making it.

Maybe it's the car crashes, though those kinda got old after a few editions, like slo-mo bullet time in sniper elite being amazing at first then by 4 you kinda get over it and realize your claim that all games would copy this, was not true.

To answer my own question, I vaguely remember forza being a bit more restrictive, and paradise allowing you to blaze your own shortcuts so much that there was a vague map suggestion to finish races. That would explain why theirs no other games like it and still not given the hand holdy nature of games today, as they need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of ease of use, which is fair given gaming's popularity.

@magikarplvl9000: Maybe go for excite truck racing or the sequel. Look it up. its on wii and has mini-games and changing maps in real-time. Crazy taxi is fun. Full auto is a gun shooting racer. Moto games. Crash team racing is easy to learn hard to master on ps4. If you're looking for a more serious try Forza horizon series.

Motherfuckers forgot about Midnight Club LA. ...and so did Rockstar.

@topcyclist:People here splooge over both. Based on what I've seen over the years, Need for Speed is the Kingdom Hearts of racing games as far as this community is concerned.

I couldn't believe it when Razor Callahan got 'Norted. Truly a turning point for the franchise.

I think Burnout Paradise and Horizon 4 are both SUPER FUN GAMES that you will have a great time!

I assumed since the OP was asking about NFS or Burnout that was what they were interested in. Forza Horizon 4 is fantastic.

Forza Horizon 4 if you have an Xbox, PC or Android device. Dirt 3 or Dirt 5 if you want something that's available on PlayStation.

Burnout: Paradise is one of the greatest racing games of all time.

Where the hell is GTxFORZA at?!?!?!?

@topcyclist: Forza Horizon is absolutely fantastic. The only reason I didn't bring it up is because the OP said they were gaming on PlayStation.

Horizon and Burnout are very different games though. Burnout is as arcade as it gets with your nitro, crazy physics, cars that turn on a dime, explosions. People who normally don't play racing games can still have fun with Burnout. Horizon while still technically arcade, has more sim sensibilities to it. Both are great in their own way.

@cornfed40: I was wondering that myself :)

@chaser324 said:

But Razor was already a high ranking Blacklist XV member. The New Blacklist XV wanted to Nort Ryan Cooper, Jack Rourke and Rachel Teller in Kingdom Speed: 358/Hot Pursuit since Ming, Taz and Ronnie were plotting to betray the organization and take Kingdom Speed for themselves due to the lack of having $5,000.

@nexivselecaf: Literally biting the inside of my mouth trying to resist the urge to further expand this fiction. Hopefully this new Fast 9 trailer coming out tomorrow can fulfill my need for high fantasy driving.

If you fancy trying a free experiment i recommend XF Drive, i wish he'd carry on making it.

@topcyclist: I know Jeff got really into the multiplayer, which was really its own thing and really cool. The rest of the game is kind of a mediocre arcade racer though. With Forza, and I have played a decent amount of the horizon games, there's just a very sterile quality on top of the constant beating over the head with their DLC and microtransactions that really turns me off.

I think Paradise did actually patch in a solution to that problem back in the day, pretty sure they added a retry option to the little pop up menu. Not sure that they ever did a particularly great job of letting people know though.

@damodar: Burnout Paradise did indeed get a retry function patched in, it's about 2-levels deep in the pause menu, but it's there if you look for it. You can definitely tell it was a patch job to add it in, and perhaps the developers weren't really on board with it!

It does make the game much better to play, especially when you are trying to complete the last few events of any given license class, and can't just fail an event and immediately be in the vicinity of something else in order to keep the game rolling along.

I’d recommend Need For Speed Hot Pursuit (the 2010 original or Remastered for modern consoles). It’s a NFS game but the makers of Burnout made it. I have it for PS3 and it’s my favorite NFS game, I still play it from time-to-time. It has some of the old school NFS (90s) flavor to it, it’s arcadey fun. It’s the best in the NFS franchise IMO. I haven’t played Remastered but I understand it to be the same game but at higher resolution. Even the same models so it was a bit of a lazy remaster, but for a phenomenal game.

Burnout Paradise is one of the best racers of all-time but it has a big learning curve in having to memorize the city before you can REALLY play it. This is true of all racing games but Burnout Paradise is bigger than most. I’d recommend NFS Hot Pursuit over it but you can’t go wrong with Burnout Paradise. It’s one of the best arcade racers ever.

I own NFS Heat too and it has some fun + redeeming qualities but it’s not as good as Hot Pursuit. Having said that, it’s the best new NFS game since Hot Pursuit. I like the customization in it but there are 2 major problems with Heat:

1) The cops are enough to make you rage-quit at the beginning before you mod your car to high heaven. They’re like Mr X in RE2 Remake, it’s ridiculous. They’re a big learning curve and a real imbalance problem until you got some crazy fast cars. Even then, they’re a bit ridiculous still.

2) It’s VERY very grindy for high level mods like engine swaps. This was ultimately a deal-breaker for me. I got burned out (pun intended) on the boring grinding. Too much open-world influence in an arcade racer. Cruising the city in your customized car online is cool for sure but the grind is a bit too much.

Honorable mentions: Inertial Drift and Hotshot Racing are both on my list. Inertial Drift’s control + drift mechanic may be a turn-off, it supposedly doesn’t control at all in the classic sense but it looks amazing. Hotshot Racing is a low-poly 90’s retro arcade racer throwback. Hotshot’s problem is in its rubber-band AI. I haven’t played either of them yet but thought I’d give them a shoutout.

I haven't played a Burnout game in over 10 years... I have NFS heat and I'm really not a fan of it. I rather play NFS Payback then heat and PSN store has NFS 2015 + NFS Rivals + NFS Payback for under $10.00 which is just picked up. Even thought I had Payback already, it is the deluxe editions.

The characters and story in Payback is ehhhh, but I live the driving it in. The challenging certain AI groups that roam the highway and the finding parts for old cars is fun. There isn't any of that in NFS Heat. The loot box mechanic for parts to upgrade your car is dumb in Payback, but I don't mind it that much.

I also have the Crew 2 which is ok, but I like the handling and driving in NFS way more for mindless driving doing dumb things.

I don't really enjoy racing sims, but Dirt V is arcadey enough (and good looking enough) that I've been having a lot of fun with it.

I highly recommend Forza Horizon 4 if you have an Xbox One, Xbox Series X or Gaming PC.

If PS4/PS5 is your platform of choice, I recommended Need For Speed Hot Pursuit (2010) Remastered, Need For Speed Heat, The Crew 2, DiRT 5, or Burnout Paradise.

Also if you have a Switch, there are tons of good kart racers you can buy such as Mario Kart, Crash Team Racing, etc.

The thing is I don't think Burnout or Forza Feel particularly arcadey. We need Ridge Racer to come back.

@hibikirush: if you don’t like the Burnout feel then you won’t like Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit.

I’d love another Ridge Racer. Ridge Racer 7 on the PS3 didn’t get great feedback from others but it’s in my top 5 arcade racers. I don’t get what people don’t like about it.

I picked up Hotshot Racing and it’s a great arcade racer. It drives very arcady like Daytona USA. The cars feel different so some of them are balanced like a Daytona feel and some are oversteer-happy for drifting. There is rubber-band AI for sure. It doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would, the AI comparable to Mario Kart.