There are few games in this media that I excel at. Don't get me wrong, there's lots I am average or maybe even good at, but it's rare I find one that I love so passionately to devote my time too. The Burnout series is one of the select few. It is the first racing game that has truly excited me, with the exception of the original Gran Turismo over 10 years ago. The idea of racing to actually take your opponent out of the running made my mouth water, the inclusion of road rage events only furthered that love, and over the years the series has always felt complete to me with every new feature Criterion added. When I first bought my Xbox, I had Burnout 3 and Halo 2. I played 2 rounds of Halo 2 online and quickly forgot about it, but could play Burnout 3 well into the night, taking on 3 people on my own on the longest map in Road Rage. Then we got Revenge, which filled me with glee thanks to it's amazing visuals, in-depth smash mode and new tracking system so I could see who I'd raced (And equally how many times I'd taken them down, or vice versa). And then Paradise happened...

Don't get me wrong. I love Burnout Paradise. I think it's a very ambitious project by some guys who clearly weren't satisfied with just making Burnout Revenge 2. There are aspects I really love about the game, but some annoyances of mine that would no doubt make me play the game a hell of a lot more if they were either fixed or removed completely.



Now in single player, it's a lot more forgiving than online. If you lose an event, there are usually some traffic lights close-by so you can start up another one, the computer is horribly bad at driving, and you can get takedowns by simply grazing their cars. But one huge problem I have is Burning Laps. For those who don't know much about Burnout, burning laps require a specific car at a specific starting point, and you have to get from start to finish in the fastest time possible. On Revenge, this was great. You picked your car before you started, you knew the track since you'd raced it before, and you'd be on your way. Here, not so much. The routes are new to an extent, although you will end up using lots of main roads you've been on before. My problem is the time it takes to start them up. If you miss that time limit, you have to drive all the way back to the start point and start up the game again. I know people have complained about the lack of a restart feature in this game, and to that I say "Screw you it's a driving game, get over it". But on these specific events, it should be required. One in particularly is ridiculously tight to make with the computer-given path, and having to take your car back to the starting line (And maybe even the car-wash if it needs fixing to go faster) only furthered my hate for burning laps.

Another weird aspect of the game is having to collect things. Yeah, makes sense right? Collecting in a driving game. Well, it sort of does. It counts every gate you smash, with every gate leading to a little shortcut you can take. There are also billboards to smash and superjumps to find, which other than looking very pretty don't really do much. However, there are 400 smashes to find in the game, 120 billboards and 50 superjumps. That's dangerously close to how many orbs were in Crackdown! Developers need to cut this out right now. "Well the game seems kind of short at the moment...I know, let's throw in 1,000 random objects to find! They'll love it!". Y'know what Criterion, we don't love it. OK, so smashes help you find shortcuts, but there is absolutely no include them in the collections when there are 400 of them. Burnout is supposed to be about racing and having fun, and driving at the speed limit so I can see the screen long enough to notice some gates and billboards is not fun.

Finally, the smash mode, or lack there of. The old smash mode, something I hold dear to my Burnout heart, has been replaced with it's deformed cousin, Showtime. You go into Showtime mode on any street, and bounce your car along the road, hitting vehicles. You get points for it, and eventually you just stop. But that's the problem. It's very possible to never stop. See in the older Burnout games, smash was a science. You had to time everything perfect to get the top score. Here, you just bounce along in on-coming and hit busses to boost your multiplayer. It's a terrible excuse for not including smash, and out of all the things in I miss in the old games, I don't understand why this wasn't included.



Now onto the online part of the game. Online, Burnout Paradise is supposed to be a very social game. If you take the game online, no one is racing or raging (Well yet). Everyone is doing challenges, a feature I absolutely loved by the way. The idea of everyone having small tasks to do, each person in the room chipping in to tick another challenge off their list, is a really appealing one to me. It brings a room full of strangers closer together than easy chicks on Craigslist, not to mention you can unlock cars for completing a certain number of these challenges (Something the game doesn't even tell you I might add). But one problem the online system has is that it lacks a ranking system. Takedown had one, Revenge had one, but this time they've moved away from it, probably to appeal to a more casual userbase. So when there's say 4 people in a room and the challenge is to barrel roll through the hanging fuselodge in the airfield (Something quite hard even for experienced players), and one of the people in that room is new to the game, hasn't unlocked all the cars and can barely finish the earlier challenges, that's it. You're either stuck there for hours until they somehow finally do it thanks to divine intervention, or they leave, and it cancels out the entire challenge making everyone else's attempts void. I could not count the amount of times this happened to me, even on some of the easier challenges, and especially when there 7-8 people in the room. The game relies on you knowing where things are, and doesn't keep track of how good you are at all. But if it had some sort of matchmaking system so you were in rooms of people equal to your skill, the challenges would be somewhat easier to beat, and you wouldn't get nearly as many people quitting out because they can't do a goddamn barrel roll.

Lastly, let's take a look at online races. If you host online, you can either set up a start to finish race, or put checkpoints to force a player around a certain part of the city. It works very well in that way, but one problem I do have is the inability to close off roads. I would have much rather had about 8 or so tracks laid out by the Criterion staff, with closed off roads, leading to people actually learning them and their few shortcuts so we could race them properly. The only reason people race nowadays is for the 10 races won achievement. Why? Because most people don't know the entire city's landscape, and they sure as hell aren't going to spend the day learning where each shortcut is placed. So yes, I think if roads could be closed off and you only had one line to follow, races would be much more popular online.

Obviously, the lack of road rages and marked men (An event I really love in single player, and ope translates well enough online) is another point, but Criterion are fixing that in the next update, so hopefully I'll be back online then. Most of this is just nit-picking (I can live without the ranks and closed off streets, and for the most part Burning Laps are very doable on your first try), but still it certainly doesn't make it easier to love this franchise.

Afterthought: I just thought that deathmatches would be awesome in Burnout Paradise. Everyone smashing into each other over the city under a time limit or something. That would be so much fun.

tl;dr: Burning Laps suck, collecting 650 things sucks, Showtime sucks, no online ranking sucks, online races suck.