Game frustrations: Burnout Paradise

Posted by James | Filed under Gaming, Opinion

I was a big fan of Burnout 3 (the original) and although i have an Xbox 360 i’d been holding off getting Burnout Paradise, partly due to the fact that i believe it has a lot of value tied to the online content/modes and thus, being a silver account holder, i don’t benefit from this. I’d also heard that it wasn’t as much a Burnout title as the later two Burnout 3 titles had been. Having since bought it (really cheap) i have discovered that these people were wrong…. i think that it’s managed to keep the series’ feel quite nicely.

Anyway onto the point of this post. I like the game but it has two annoying facets:

  1. No race restarts
  2. Half the map is empty

Okay, i’ve seen number one mentioned many times in many forums and i was prepared for it. I don’t find it a problem because usually there’s another event near where i finish off (or not depending on where i rage quit the current event ;) ). Number two, however, is incredibly annoying.

The left hand side of the map is pretty barren in terms of events (i’m not bothered by the petrol/junk/repair stations). This means that any and every event that shunts me off over there to the three possible destinations leaves me stranded in the middle of nowhere. I hate it, i hate it, i HATE it!

I played Test Drive Unlimited on the PC and it’s a very similar game except that it’s slightly less arcadey but has a larger island. I believe that it’s this aspect that made the developers include a ‘teleport’ option to places you’d already visited. I remember being impressed at the time and i wish that Paradise had this function….. not only that but i’ve been around Paradise city and i’m almost to an “A” licence and i’ve pretty much been everywhere. I got the game yesterday and after playing around 10 hours i’ve done a large amount of the events, discovered many of the shortcuts and destroyed around two-thirds of the billboards (i’m still really low on the special jumps)…. and i’m really thankful that i bought it cheap. Seriously, for all the ‘replayability’ of the title there aren’t many events (actually there are a large number of events 40 races and the other game modes but since many of them all go to one of 8 places it makes many of them very similar in route you can take) and in the single player it seems that the AI/car selection is limited to whatever car the player is driving so choosing a different car doesn’t really make much difference for offline modes.

So what does all this mean? The game is good but not worth a full price buy – but then at this point in its life cycle you’d be hard-pressed to find it for £35-40. I payed £15 to get it bundled with Trivial Pursuit and i would guess that it’s worth (to me) £9 from that purchase.

Permalink | April 22nd, 2009

3 Responses to “Game frustrations: Burnout Paradise”

  1. Destrin Says:
    April 23rd, 2009 at 8:50 am

    The PS3 version is available on the PSN for a fairly reasonable price I think (If Sony were useful I would check the website and find out the exact price but they aren’t and my PS3 isn’t nearby!)

    I don’t think the restarting itself is such a big issue most of the time but I hear you on the lack of events on the left. The game really needs a ‘teleport to one of the 8 finishing points’ button to help speed up things like returning to the start of an event or going back to a useful location

  2. eternalduoae Says:
    April 23rd, 2009 at 10:03 am

    Yeah, i like the game it’s just a fairly big niggle. I’m finding myself cherry picking events that lead to the events on the right side of the map… but of course the higher level licences require so many events that you end up needing to complete the ones that end on the left anyway.

    Maybe if i didn’t suck so much then it’d be fine ;)

  3. Carpet Says:
    August 30th, 2010 at 2:01 am

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