First impression: Burnout Paradise
I played the demo for Burnout Paradise and wasn’t exactly thrilled. Reviews have been favorable so I was excited when I finally booted up the rental yesterday. I gotta say, I feel the same as I did after playing the demo.
Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of cool things to like in Paradise. The sense of speed is amazing, the soundtrack’s pretty good and it looks like Burnout. The new breakable collectibles are awesome — just smash through them to unlock. The problem is it just doesn’t quite feel Burnouty. I loved Burnout Revenge, despite the fact it had some ridiculously hard achievements. The structure, the game play, everything about it was smooth, challenging and fun.
The move to an open world environment has me a little flustered. Maybe it’s because I was late to the Burnout party, I played Takedown once or twice in the last generation before purchasing Revenge on 360. But I miss Crash mode, I miss the structure, and I miss the way races are presented. In this new open world you have to pay attention to your map or a street sign marker instead of the cars and structures that are flying past you at mach speeds. In previous games, roads not on the race route were blocked off. It also seems like the game engine is not very forgiving when it comes to crash detection. A couple times I thought I was only going to sideswipe something and ended up turning my car into a heap of twisted metal. By the way crashes are brutal (in a good way) looking.
I’m going to try to play some more, but as of now, I’m just lukewarm on it. I spent a lot of time just zipping around finding unlockables and jumps — I only completed two events — so I’ll hold my review until I play through a handful of events.
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