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Burnout Paradise

Developer: Criterion Games Publisher: Electronic Arts
22 January 2008
Burnout Paradise - cover art
Glitchwave rating
3.51 / 5.0
0.5
5.0
 
 
1,025 Ratings / 2 Reviews
#1,127 All-time
#38 for 2008
In the heart-pounding cinematic world of "Burnout Paradise," the asphalt jungle of Paradise City becomes the ultimate battleground for adrenaline-fueled racing and vehicular mayhem.
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2008 Criterion EA  
DVD
US 0 14633 15639 3
2008 Criterion EA  
Blu-ray
XNA 0 14633 15633 1 BLUS-30061
2009 Criterion EA  
Blu-ray
JP 4 938833 009197 BLJM-60133
Show all 12 releases
2009 Criterion EA  
DVD
GB 5 030930 067151
2018 Criterion Stellar  
Blu-ray
XOC 5 035226 122743 CUSA-10851
Burnout Paradise Remastered
2018 Criterion Stellar  
Blu-ray
XNA 0 14633 73897 1 CUSA-10866
Burnout Paradise Remastered
2018 Stellar Criterion  
Download
2020 Criterion Stellar  
Game card
GB 5 030942 124002
Burnout Paradise Remastered
2020 Criterion Stellar  
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Title
+ Massive world.
- Feels really outdated in 2023.
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Chieftah 2023-10-01T18:17:05Z
2023-10-01T18:17:05Z
C
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it's like having your tomtom upside down
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Aptmass 2023-02-20T22:27:08Z
2023-02-20T22:27:08Z
1
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Title
Burnout: Paradise is an open-world racing game, with an emphasis on speed and ramming your opponents. The events are started from traffic lights in the city. You need to slow down near them, then hit accelerate and brake to trigger them. There's a few race types; Race, Road Rage, One on One, Stunt, Burning Route, and Marked Man.

Road Rage is to take down a set amount of cars within the time-limit. Stunt gives you a target score and you must achieve it by using boosts, performing jumps, drifts and smashing destructible billboards. Burning Route is a time-trial using a specific car. Marked Man events give you the objective of reaching a destination without being taken out by a few faster and stronger opponents.

The events are started from the traffic light which triggered the event, but the finishing location is one of the eight landmarks which means a lot of the races feel repetitive. When you upgrade your licence (essentially levelling up), the events are reset so you can play them again which also adds to the repetition. It seems that on many occasions, you end up in the North-West section of the city which is devoid of events, in contrast to the Eastern side which has plenty going on. There's no quick travel which means you are forced to drive for a few minutes for your next event. At first, it seemed that you had to drive all the way back in order to restart an event. Out of curiosity, I tried using the D-pad and I accidentally discovered another menu which has the option to restart last event, quit current event, and jump into an online game.

In the events, you are shown your current location and the finishing point. You have the flexibility of choosing your own way there or following the game's cues to guide you. Your car does automatically indicate to try and guide you on the calculated route, and the street name and direction appears at the top of the screen. At anytime, you can pull up the map, but this detracts from the action.

The map design mainly features long straights and simple corners which allows you to drive at high speeds. Since there is no set route to take, it can be very annoying when you do miss a key turning. The on-screen map is fairly small and in some places, it can look a bit cluttered. It's quite hard to glance at your map whilst travelling at high-speed; this can result in crashing into cars or barriers, leading to frustrating moments.

To complete the races, you have to finish 1st; there's no award for second place or below. When you complete events, new cars will be driving through the streets. Take them down and their car will be added to your collection. To switch cars, you must drive to the Junk-yards rather than having an easily accessible menu.

Each vehicle has three stats; speed, boost and strength, as well as a characteristic to determine if they are more appropriate for Racing, Aggression or Stunts. These characteristics influence how they obtain boost power and give an indication on their stats. Aggression cars have the strength, but usually lack speed, Stunt cars are usually balanced, Speed cars are the fastest and the way they boost is different. Boosts can only be activated when full and depleting all of it activates a 'Burnout' where the boost is replenished and can be chained for continuous boosts.

Your boost is gained by dangerous/aggressive driving such as taking down cars, gaining air-time, driving on the wrong side of the road, and narrowly avoiding crashes. Nudging cars into danger is a large part of the game. When this happens, you get a slow motion view of the destruction; which is a nice touch. It's a good idea to boost into opponents to make sure you apply enough force to send them to their demise. They do respawn like you do, but it costs them a few seconds.

Outside the events, you can explore to destroy barriers to unveil shortcuts, destroy billboards and making the super jumps. Each street has a time-trial which you can compete against online records.

By pressing LB+RB, you can activate Show-time. Your car will flip and you have to guide your car into oncoming traffic to cause a chain of destruction. Usually, there isn't many cars roaming the streets, but when you activate Showtime, there's plenty that spawn. Creating your own multi-car pile-up sounds fun on paper, but it's actually incredibly boring. You can press A to make your car jump and this drains your boost, whereas crashing replenishes it. Even if you have limited skill, this can drag on because you can have far too much control over your car, and far too much boost so can end up miles away from where you started. Add to that the fact that there is no reward, it's a redundant feature.

There's a few places you can drive through such Petrol Stations (refill your boost bar), Paint Shops (unlocks a new colour for your car), Repair Shop (repairs your car) and Junk-yards (let's you choose from your car collection). You can drive through them whilst racing (apart from the junk-yard) to receive their effects. Refilling your boost in the Petrol Stations mid-race can be a nice benefit.

In addition to cars, you can drive motorcycles which have specific events for them.

The biggest problem in Burnout, is that it's far too easy until you are working your way to obtaining your Burnout Licence. This means it takes around 6 hours to start posing a challenge, and even then, the difficulty seems hit and miss. Sometimes it will be easy, and other events seem like you have to complete them without crashing once.

The graphics are okay, and there's a damage model to show dents and deformities to your car. There's no driver in the car, which looks a bit silly when the camera pans around. The soundtrack is licensed from rock, electronic and classical songs. The title track of Guns N' Roses' Paradise City is sure to annoy, because even if you disable it in the options, it will still come on when you boot up the game.

Overall, Burnout Paradise is functional, but is boring by design. The only thing it has going for it is speed, but there's other games that have combined speed with destruction in a much better way such as Split/Second; which gives you more action and much more fun.
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CaptainClam 2017-09-29T22:58:18Z
2017-09-29T22:58:18Z
2.5
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The desire to go full open-world has its upsides and downsides. The natural flow of starting a race at any intersection and opening the world up that much more for more challenges is undercut by the inability to instantly restart races at launch and the fiddly nature of getting it working through patches. Other than that, siloing off traffic checking to certain cars was a good compromise, taking Burnout back to the difficulty it was known for. Overall, considering all roads seem to lead to open world these days, Paradise does the job just fine.
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Lowlander2 2018-05-17T14:29:17Z
2018-05-17T14:29:17Z
4.0
2
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The actual driving mechanics are perfectly fine, but the game absolutely suffers from having an open world without measures in place to prevent the overwhelming freedom to get in the way. Starting races via traffic lights is a bore, and not being able to reset races after not winning is a nuisance.
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guy1nc0gn1t0 2017-04-17T04:27:15Z
2017-04-17T04:27:15Z
2.5
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not gonna finish
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Freedom at an expense.
Burnout Paradise was an attempt at making the franchise relevant again as the open world craze was at its peak, but unfortunatly it was a case of one step forward and two steps back. The world design is pretty amazing, and there are a lot of shortcuts and jumps to find. Unfortunatly, the open world comes at an expense of the level design of the individual races. As the races take place on the same open world, this means that you will pass the same places a lot of the time, and because there are no restrictions this means that the group doesnt stay together. Which means that the opportunity for takedown is much diminuished when compared to the previous games.

The second issue is that the gameplay doesnt quite feel as refined as the other entries. The camera is zoomed out, and the sense of speed isnt nearly as great. Its still a satisfying racer, and the more prevalence of jumps makes the camera change understand.

The soundtrack is pretty dull alt rock and pop punk for the most part, with a few exceptions. The soundtrack lacks cohesion, even if i lack a few tracks a whole lot, they just dont fit the game. One such instance is the inclusion of "one arm scissor" by At the Drive In is a fantastic song, but doesnt quite fit the nature of an arcade racer.

Huge variety of vehicles is a big plus, as well as the different modes. The online mode is quite fun to mess around. I never 100% completed the game as the difficulty really ramps up in the stunt game modes towards the end, but i had a lot of fun with it. Just not as much fun as the more linear, but more intense, Burnout 3. And its such a shame that after this one criterion was absorbed to make Need for Speed games.
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Threntall 2016-09-04T20:16:53Z
2016-09-04T20:16:53Z
3.5
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Catalog

CaptainPlasma Burnout Paradise 2024-03-17T05:43:50Z
Windows
2024-03-17T05:43:50Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
jackfennimore Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box 2024-03-13T01:44:24Z
Windows
2024-03-13T01:44:24Z
4.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Anatommy Burnout Paradise 2024-03-12T12:30:55Z
2024-03-12T12:30:55Z
4.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Action52 Burnout Paradise 2024-03-11T13:06:47Z
Xbox 360 • US
2024-03-11T13:06:47Z
3.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
eliottstaten Burnout Paradise 2024-03-11T01:27:55Z
2024-03-11T01:27:55Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
noyade Burnout Paradise 2024-02-27T12:40:48Z
2024-02-27T12:40:48Z
5.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
DaggerDraven Burnout Paradise 2024-02-24T04:04:09Z
PS3 • XNA
2024-02-24T04:04:09Z
1
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
DaggerDraven Burnout Paradise 2024-02-24T04:03:57Z
2024-02-24T04:03:57Z
4.0
1
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Giann96 Burnout Paradise 2024-02-22T08:30:39Z
PS3 • XNA
2024-02-22T08:30:39Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
velvetun Burnout Paradise 2024-02-17T22:54:52Z
2024-02-17T22:54:52Z
3.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Richardthe4th Burnout Paradise 2024-02-14T22:41:53Z
2024-02-14T22:41:53Z
2.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Jaggeraz9599 Burnout Paradise 2024-02-14T05:15:14Z
2024-02-14T05:15:14Z
4.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Content rating
ESRB: E10+
Player modes
1-8 players
Media
1x Blu-ray
Multiplayer options
Online
Franchises

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  • Previous comments (35) Loading...
  • lillhium17 2023-10-05 15:23:51.615071+00
    I hate to admit it because it's always been one of my favorite racing games, but age hasn't been as kind to it as i'd hoped. It gets pretty repetitive very fast. The open world design and exploration is still great though.
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  • Funcrusher 2023-12-06 23:12:49.861956+00
    I'm 5 or 6 hours in and not having much fun. Its like a severely downgraded NFSU2 with most of the good parts ripped out and replaced with infuriatingly bad things. Does every other event have to be a game of bumper cars? Does every race have to be a comically overpaced game of 'dodge the traffic' around repetitive 90° zig zags? Am I meant to know the map well enough that I'm not just desperately trying to follow other cars or the (shittily implemented) navigation system hoping for the best? Honestly really hope it ends up clicking with me, because at the moment it's got to be one of the least enjoyable racing games I can remember playing.
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  • Funcrusher 2023-12-12 22:26:56.566345+00
    Ok my bad it gets kinda fun after a couple more hours.
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  • FarioMerreira 2024-01-26 00:37:38.956498+00
    this game's decision of not having a proper gps is genius
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  • Drug_Use 2024-01-31 22:43:49.857248+00
    Oh my god there might actually be a new Burnout
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  • DrPepperoni 2024-02-14 13:06:21.675407+00
    I hate that they decided that adding the gameplay element of navigating the map was needed. It takes so much off the pure joy of destruction.
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