There are few pure driving games from the last several years that have earned as much admiration in the wider gaming community as Burnout Paradise. It’s a game that’s remembered fondly for its radically unrestrained driving mechanics and its pioneering sense of openness and freedom. With these elements in tow Paradise deliberately reached beyond dedicated fans of the racing genre and appealed to the broader gaming collective. That being said, it’s also a game from 2008 and even for titles under a decade old it’s easy to look at them through rose-tinted glasses. So in the interests of either shattering some comfortable illusions or renewing praise for what might become a classic of video game driving, let’s take a look back at Burnout Paradise.

One of the fundamental traits that defines Paradise is how Burnout as a series has come to think about car crashes and competition between drivers. Where most other multiplayer games are about achieving victory through direct confrontation between players, racing games are more often about players trying to achieve victory by performing the same task in parallel and trying to outclass each other at it. In racing games you can often block the space other cars can move into or even ram them, but play is mainly about who can run through the same track and get to the finish fastest. There is a neutral goal which you are all trying to use the fundamental mechanics of the game to forge your own path to. But this isn’t how, for example, a shooter works.

In a shooter game you and your opponents are not reaching for neutral targets, you are each others’ targets. The way to beat players or AI becomes far more direct and confrontational: rather than just doing better than them and making passing clashes, you must consistently interfere with them and remove them from play, even if only temporarily. Sure, shooters might have neutral elements in their gametypes like flags or capture points, but these are in themselves ways to set up individual players as targets for elimination. You can see how this concept of direct confrontation extends out to fighting games, strategy games, and most other multiplayer genres. Kart racers somewhat blur the line between this kind of overtly aggressive competition and traditional racing game fair, but Burnout is an even closer melding of the concepts, making elimination of opponents a big focus of play and creating entire modes out of attacking or avoiding attacks by other drivers.

A couple of key features that Burnout carries over from action games specifically is that it has this very immediate turnaround from you making an attack on a player to them being affected by it and there’s a very tactile sense of hitting your opponents. It’s comparable to the way shooters and fighting games think about making contact with enemies. The crashing system also means that if you get taken out and have to reset, then at least there’s a little spectacle to watch in the meantime. Does Burnout treat crashing as worthy of punishment? Sometimes. But where most other driving games view crashes in purely negative terms, Burnout performs anarchic celebrations of them. It’s also no coincidence that this game has a simultaneous focus on crashing and moving at absurd speeds.

Acceleration and movement speed in Burnout are taken beyond what other driving titles would consider sensible and this would be impossible without the high probability of you and your opponents frequently crashing. Because of this the game needs a system that turns crashes into something fun, otherwise play would just be an annoying conga line of failure. So it pulls that essential mechanic out of the hat: drivers can manipulate each other into crashes as a form of attack. You can also view it the other way around: the game has a fun crash system, but it would rarely enter play unless players have a reasonably high probability of colliding with objects at any one time, and so the developers have to crank the speed way up.

A nice little touch is that taking down another driver saves you from any imminent crash and puts your car back on the track, moving in the correct direction. It takes colliding with another player at an awkward angle from a mutual suicide that you wouldn’t attempt, to a risky but viable maneuver where only one can come out unscathed. When it goes correctly there’s this moment of euphoria as you move from a position of danger to happy success. This mechanic also means that once you’ve ploughed your opponent into a truck, wall, or other object, you don’t then have the anti-climax of backing up and getting going again. Instead, the game moves ahead smoothly and keeps up that blistering pace.

Of course, a lot of that pace is conveyed by the game’s boost mechanic. The fact that you don’t just have a frighteningly high top speed, but have to hold down a button to move that bit faster lets you feel a very deliberate sense of being behind many of the game’s most intense moments. Additionally, if the game let you get to this ridiculous speed with the accelerator alone you’d constantly be having to let off on that accelerator to handle turns, which is both unintuitive and not particularly thrilling in a game like Burnout. Nobody comes to Burnout to constantly take their foot off the pedal. The boost isn’t just a cool feature, it helps amplify almost all of the best things about this game. What do you want to do most in Paradise? Go fast, perform stunts, and crash other peoples’ cars. What do you have to do to get more boost? Go fast, perform stunts, and crash other peoples’ cars. The boost itself then comes back around to help you do those things more effectively. It’s a delicious feedback loop.

I wonder if this whole speed-crash dynamic is why there have been few to no other games like Burnout Paradise. Depicting the inevitable high speed crashes of Burnout with even a passing realism also means depicting severe damage to the vehicles involved. While Burnout uses unlicensed cars, most other racing games have a borderline fetishistic attachment to real car brands. Car manufacturers are notorious sticklers for their products remaining in a reasonably presentable condition in their video game appearances, and as discussed Burnout’s speed and crashing mechanics aren’t separable, so perhaps no unlicensed vehicles then no Burnout-like elements. Granted, there is 2012’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted which is a game very similar to Burnout Paradise that also has licensed cars in it, but that still wouldn’t exist without Burnout developer Criterion, and the radically sanitised crashes of Most Wanted look just wrong. They don’t have the punch and personality of Paradise’s spectacular wrecks. I hear it frequently said that product placement in games is only ever coincidental to the rest of the content and that we should only think of it as window dressing, but Burnout Paradise may be an honest to god example of how branding and marketing (or the lack of it) can radically change the way a game plays. However, if you, like me, remembered the way Paradise handles crashes also being one of the principal problems with the game, you’d be right.

Burnout’s extreme speed means that even slight twitches of the left stick at one point on the road can mean a broad difference in where you end up a second or two down it. It also means that even the few seconds lost when you wreck often translate to falling behind 2-3 places. In short, the crash dynamic has the potential to be punishing and to repeatedly break pacing, and so it’s especially important that hazards and opponents on the road be properly telegraphed to the player, and that the number and nature of the obstacles in a player’s path be carefully controlled. This is easier to do on the kind of closed-off, tightly engineered race tracks the Burnout mechanics are built for, but those same mechanics are not necessarily built for driving around an open-world. Paradise City is thickly populated with vehicles, buildings, and other geometry, which is great for imparting the sense of this urban and rural hub full of character, but not so great for players being able to easily recognise everything that’s in front of them in a fraction of a second, and in Burnout a fraction of a second is often the difference between crashing and surviving. Even the slightest chip to your car can mean you wreck out and for what is clearly meant to be a game of empowerment, it’s surprising how vulnerable it sometimes makes you.

It probably doesn’t help that a lot of things on a road are grey. With a lot of speed and a bit of distance streets, walls, ramps, and highway dividers begin to blur into each other. It also didn’t help that in the launch version of the game some event types had car damage represented through contrast being drained from the screen, only making it harder to distinguish between items in your environment. Similarly, it can be tough to tell at a glance whether a car is a civilian or a foe, which is frustrating when hitting the former will crash you, but hitting the latter will put you ahead in an event. From a distance they can both just look like a set of tail lights. There’s also no way to predict if oncoming traffic is about to swerve into you, obstacles can be created by vehicles ahead of you crashing into each other with no warning, reversing can be a needless struggle, and there’s no means to tell if there’s an obstacle around the next corner, over the next hill, behind another vehicle, or in any area that’s obscured from you. Unless you’ve experienced it for yourself it’s hard to convey how annoying it is to turn through an intersection into a four door you couldn’t have possibly known was there or to have a competing racer slam into a van up ahead and you be punished for it.

Burnout Paradise is a game that demands precision control, but does not give you precision controls. It’s a game that forces you to take split-second decisions when it cannot properly convey information about the game state in split-seconds. It’s a game that insists you take in a complete picture of the road in front of you while frequently obfuscating information about that road. It’s a game that is trying to be about freedom and fluidity, but where gameplay can often feel oppressive and pacing becomes choppy. It is a chaotic experience and that is part of what’s so thrilling about it, but chaos is inherently unpredictable, and unpredictable gameplay is unfair gameplay. This is a very physics-based game and sometimes it just feels like you’re getting tossed about in the semi-random pinball machine of Paradise City.

We often talk about game quality as though it’s just a product of weighing up a game’s positives against its negatives, but it matters where in the experience those positives and negatives exist. Sometimes a game can have huge flaws, but their damage to the overall experience can be limited if they only exist in one facet of the design or for limited sections of the playtime. However, if a game’s flaws are baked into its fundamental mechanics you’ve got more of a problem, because whatever activity you’re performing in the game at any one time you’re going to encounter its ugly side. This latter scenario is what makes Burnout Paradise’s flaws generally so noticeable. But you may recall all of this. What’s easier to forget is that this game is also missing a bunch of features that we take for granted now and really weren’t particularly advanced when it was released.

You cannot set waypoints, there are no guidelines on the map or in the environment, there aren’t any arrows to show you where to go, and the game was out for more than a year before Criterion added a “Restart Event” button. The option remains pretty well-hidden to this day. You can also lose entire races because turns are frequently not signaled long enough in advance and now and then the game will reset you in the wrong direction after a crash. These issues create hitches in both open-world roaming and competition against other racers, although definitely in that second one more than the first. Because the game is poor at guiding you, events often demand you look away from the action to check indicators or the mini-map, but taking your eyes off of the road for even a second can easily cause you to wreck, so you’re stuck in a paradox. Due to its extreme speed and capability for punishment, Paradise is the kind of game that’s most in need of features like breadcrumb trails and properly highlighted restart buttons, but just does not have them. The designers’ hardline stance against using the environment itself for GUI elements is probably part of a commitment to putting a realistic city in front of you, but that only accounts for half the problem, and that’s a slightly confusing decision when Burnout is clearly not going for total realism. It would also be easy to throw the absence of fast travel and the elusiveness of the “Retry Last Event” option into the same basket, but they’re actually somewhat conducive to what the game is going for.

One of the nice things about Paradise is that just where one fun section of the game leaves off another picks up. When you pass the finish line for one event there’s always another nearby, if you get one collectible there’s likely to be an additional collectible close, and you can chain together tricks like drifts and “Near Misses” as you move between places. Heck, just the basic experience of driving really fast down one of the game’s roads is fun, making the game one, long continuous string of exciting things to do. Notice that many roads curve into each other and that you can sometimes cut corners between streets, often allowing you to keep moving across the city without ever having to break the flow of your movement. Many open-world games make these huge, sprawling maps to explore, and put a lot of fun things to see and cool activities to perform in them, but don’t allow smooth transitions from diversion to diversion or make the mechanical process of moving across their world compelling. Burnout Paradise does, and that’s why there’s no fast travel and why it held back on the “Retry” option. It doesn’t want you frustrating yourself by replaying the same race over and over when you could be seeing all the other content the game has to offer, and it doesn’t want you just skipping between places when you could be using Burnout’s thrilling driving mechanics to get there and discovering its world along the way. Related to this is just how Burnout wields its mass of activities and collectibles.

Even by today’s standards Burnout Paradise provides a huge quantity of tasks to get lost in. There are 400 gates to smash, 120 billboards to break, and 50 super jumps to perform. I remember in 2009 when Assassin’s Creed II came out and people thought its challenge to collect 200 feathers from around virtual Italy was nuts, which it was, but I also want to reach back in 2009, shake people, and tell them “Burnout Paradise came out a year before and it has 570 collectibles to find”. Then there’s the 120 events to beat, the 75 cars to obtain, the 500 online challenges to fill in, the 35 drive-throughs to find, the 50 achievements to unlock, and the 64 roads which each have their own minigame score and time trial to attain. Yet this abundance of content is not what made you remember having so much fun with Paradise’s events and side-activities. Plenty of games go for scale, but here Criterion go for something more.

As mentioned before, the density with which this content is packed into the world is important, and that may be another reason we’ve not seen many other games like Burnout Paradise. With the size of maps in open-world games today it would be hard to chock every tiny corner full of this quantity of events and collectibles, not to mention that with an enormous map, depriving players of a “fast travel” option would be right out of the question. Part of the reason that Burnout can survive without fast travel is because you can move across its environment so quickly, which again, wouldn’t be possible for many other games. Compare Burnout Paradise to Playground Games’ 2012 title Forza Horizon. Horizon attempts to place a Burnout Paradise-like shell around Forza’s track racing dynamics, but even though there’s an enjoyable game in there, the open-world isn’t nearly as fun to just sandbox about in as Paradise City. Sure, Horizon may have a large map, collectibles, little Paradise-style bonuses like the “Near Miss” and so on, but not only does it not have Burnout’s off-the-rails driving, it has nowhere near the density of content. The map is large, but as opposed to feeling like every other road is brimming over with pleasant surprises, so much of it feels empty and barren, and you end up thinking “It’s appropriate it’s set in a rural wasteland, and of course it has fast travel: it’s there so I can skip over all of this”.

Burnout Paradise also has a wonderful variety in its activities, more so than most driving games. From moment to moment it might be a racing game, a stunt game, a deathmatch game, or whatever the hell Showtime was. Paradise wouldn’t be able to pack nearly as much content into itself if it weren’t for this diversity; the game’s multiple event types allow it to get a relatively large amount of playtime out of relatively small portions of the map. You may retread the same roads hundreds of times over, but not only is Paradise’s gameplay very enduring, you cover these areas in greatly different contexts. Additionally, the Burning Routes (time trials for each vehicle) mean that you get some time out of every single car in your garage, instead of suboptimal vehicles just rusting away in there for all eternity. The variety here is helped along by the fact that Paradise’s cars aren’t just separated by their stats, but also by the mechanics they apply to boosting. Although, that’s not to say there aren’t cars in the game it’s unpleasant to have to drive.

Another inescapable factor in the quality of Paradise’s content is how you collect the collectibles. Many other games spend time fine-tuning mechanics that feel fantastic to engage with, but then when it comes to collectibles throw those mechanics to one side and make the process of obtaining these additional items a case of dryly running over them and pressing a button. I think there’s a lot to be said for the steady sense of productivity that this can create, but at the same time the way most AAA studios deploy collectibles builds a picture of lingering cynicism. It feels like many action games don’t understand the divide they’re creating when they have their main content be about their exciting story or mechanics, but side content be about these slow, meticulous object hunts. Worse, it’s hard not to feel like many games jam in a bunch of collectibles due to the AAA industry coming to place too much value on quantity over quality, padding games out with playtime for the sake of playtime. Paradise may be many things, but it is not cynical. It wants to approach every idea it introduces with enthusiasm, and that’s how it approaches its collectibles, bringing an impressive combination of both quantity and quality.

In Burnout Paradise the mechanics you use to obtain your collectibles don’t just exist in addition to the great core driving mechanics, they are one and the same, and the dev team are probably able to treat the collectibles with the degree of care they do because they make them such a large part of the game. Speeding through breakable walls, crashing cars, and making jumps are your collectible content. The kind of spectacular, uninhibited things that you’d do in a sandbox experience if left to your own devices become part of the core gameplay and you are explicitly encouraged towards and rewarded for them. Titles like Just Cause and Red Faction Guerilla can be seen implementing their own versions of the same idea to great effect, and it feels like there’s so much to learn from here. Imagine if we had more shooter games where gunning down special targets got you your collectibles or platform games where you got to perform enormous jumps to tick off your optional tasks.

Also note that event playspaces, collectible locations, and the world map being part of the same environment allows you as the player to very fluidly transition between focusing on main content, side content, and the open-world. You don’t have pick a level or even go that far off your regular path to engage with most of Burnout Paradise’s collectibles, which means that you can grab them as you’re free-roaming or participating in another event, and the lack of load screens, menus, and breaks in between activities lets everything you do really feel like it happens in the city instead of a special box the game has laid out for it. This lack of instancing also allows you to approach activities on your own terms, lets the game gently present you with plenty of chances to engage with events you might not normally consider, and is essential to keeping up the sense of flow and freedom the game is going for. The only exceptions are the Burning Routes where having to end up at a specific intersection with a specific car does not allow them to be eased into in the same way.

It’s also worth turning, at least briefly, to the general philosophy behind Burnout Paradise’s world. Paradise City is made realistic, but only up to a very specific point: the game wants to be highly transparent that the world in front of you is moulded to be a utopia for drivers before anything else. It’s right there in the name: Burnout Paradise. You’re not making your mark on a city designed for its citizens like in GTA, instead the city was designed especially for you. Then there’s the game’s approach to story and characters. Many driving games have forgone these elements almost entirely, which is good for building a game that feels serious and technically-focused (the traditional Forza is a good example, as is Project CARS), but doesn’t work nearly as well if you want something light-hearted and highly stylised, and so in an effort to feel less cold and uptight many driving games have presented actual narratives. However, these games have often been able to only loosely commit to these stories, giving them a dull D-grade tinge.

Paradise finds a third way that probably would have fit a lot of other racing games better. The game has no human racers, which I’ve most commonly seen attributed to helping it achieve a 12+ rating, but it also means that it’s neither left with blank, faceless dummies in place of characters, nor does it waste its time on substandard character interactions and arcs that it only half cares about and that would break up the action. Paradise lets you just get into your car and drive uninterrupted by plot, but the game’s inclusion of “DJ Atomika” still buys it a little bit of human personality, and allows it to present new information without worrying about creating whole scenes between your character and others every time.

It’s not a coincidence that Criterion picked a laidback radio DJ as their sole character either. Notice that while many other driving games have played on underground street culture or professional track racing for their subject matter, Paradise comes from a more original place. The game wants you to feel like you just got a beautiful new car and are spending a summer on the road. The experience is like an aesthetic emulation of being a teenager finding freedom through getting your license and driving for the first time. I mean Paradise literally begins with you getting a provisional license and a second-hand junker. I get that same feel from the game’s alt rock soundtrack which occasionally descends into the lovably trashy or mopey. The vanilla game also had a skyline which would shift from its own version of sunrise through the day to sunset, which reflected the summery nature of the experience. The point is this is a racer that allows itself a personality more imaginative than just being about car culture. It’s very aware of its own status as a driving game, but “driving game” is a broad genre. The spirit of Paradise’s play is this rock-and-roll demolition derby which wants to remain none the less cool and approachable, and the game has a face to match that.

Burnout Paradise is itself a bit of a teenager. It’s often antagonising, self-contradictory, and reckless in ways that hurt it. At the same time it has this boundless energy, exciting appetite for destruction, and a limitless world of opportunity before it. When taken as a full experience it more than holds and as video games designed to elicit pure fun go, this is still one of the best. Thanks for reading.

Corrections: This post originally stated that console versions of the game were locked at 30 FPS and that there were no “Retry” or “Restart” buttons in the game. These mistakes have since been corrected.