First Thoughts on Burnout: Paradise

January 2nd, 2008 | Posted in blog posts, gaming |

Last night I downloaded the demo for Burnout Paradise on the XBox 360 and tried it out. I’m a big fan of the Burnout series (although not as big a fan as my wife is!).  We have copies of the game on just about every console we own.



For those not familiar with the series, Burnout at its core is a racing game. You get cars you can modify and race, etc. But the twist is that this game focuses more on creatively crashing cars and causing damage than actually racing.  In this way it is the exact opposite of games like Forza Motorsports with is a racing simulator.  My favorite event in Burnout is the Crash Party, where you launch your car into a busy intersection and try to cause the most amount of monetary damage possible.  It’s quite a form of stress relief. 

I was really excited to play the latest incarnation of the game and downloaded the demo as soon as I could.

This game is kind of a departure from previous versions.  At first I was a little underwhelmed.  Instead of getting a menu where you can choose the event you want to do, you are thrust into a city where you have to find different areas to change your paint scheme, refill your boost meter, or repair damages to the car. You also have to drive around to find different locations for your events.  So in a way it feels like Burnout meets GTA.  Not exactly what I was hoping for.

One neat feature though is that if you have a camera you can take a picture of yourself and it becomes your driver’s license photo.  That becomes more fun if you are playing online and you can see who you took down, or who took you down.  It adds a little more personality to the game.

Another cool feature is that even though this is a demo, you can play online!  So people on Xbox Live, download the demo and let’s try out some of the online stuff.

The thing about this game is that I want to drive really fast. I want to beat up other cars. I want to crash in spectacular ways.  I don’t want to have to drive around looking at a mini map to find an intersection for a particular event, slow down enough to hit the keys necessary to start the event, and then go.  At first I was  thinking I wouldn’t like it and would skip this version of the game.

However as I played the demo, I started to warm up to the idea of the city environment.  While different from previous games, I don’t think it is a bad idea.  Just different.  I think once the full version of the game comes out and there are actually more than like 3 events you can do it will be a lot more fun.  So right now I’m taking a “wait and see” approach to the game and will re-evaluate it after playing the full thing.

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