You’re racing down a packed city street; your opponents are neck and neck with you, as you desperately weave in and out of traffic at one-hundred thirty miles per-hour. All of a sudden, your opponent car slightly nudges you and your car is sent spinning out of control. Slamming into a wall, your car’s hood crumples like paper and glass and twisted metal spray everywhere. Crash and Burn. Normally, in any other racing game, those two words mean epic failure for the player. When their car resets, the player is usually hopelessly left in the dust with no choice but to restart and try again.
However, fans of the Burnout franchise know that crashing in these games is considered the name of the game. Game developer Criterion completely rewrote the racing game genre by blending fast cars and actually encouraging spectacular crashes like the one written above. The object of these games is not only racing to finish first, but also ramming and taking down opponent racers along the way.
After many such games, Criterion has again raised the bar for racing games with Burnout Paradise, one of the best racing games to date. Combining an all new open world free-style driving mechanic with the same crash oriented racing everyone loves, Burnout Paradise completely changes how the game is played. Set in the huge, beautiful world of Paradise City, the player is given complete freedom to drive around the seven- hundred plus miles of the bustling city. From a traffic packed metropolis, and scenic ocean-side roads, to lonely country lanes, Paradise City is a visually stunning place. As you drive along each individually named street, you’ll come to different intersections, each home to its own event the player can enter. With over a hundred different events consisting of regular races, stunt runs, road rages, marked mans, and burning routes. The player has complete freedom of choice in which events to partake in, with each win adding to the total number needed in order to upgrade your different licenses. Certain number of wins also unlocks different cars, which you can easily switch by visiting a junkyard and take your new ride out around Paradise.
You can also take the cars you unlock with you in Paradise’s new, innovative online mode. With no online menu navigation whatsoever, players are easily able to instantly join a game of up to eight players with just a few button presses. Players can then partake in solo online races and stunt runs, team up in team road rages and marked mans, or just roam the city conceiving their own events to do.
With a brilliant new free-roam style, and innovative online mode, Criterion took big risks with Paradise City that paid off fabulously. So next time you crash and burn in Paradise City, just take a firm grip on your controller, and prepare to dish out some takedown retribution.