There’s no real learning curve to speak of, so if you like driving games that present increasing difficulty and challenge as you progress, you may get bored fairly easily. The scenery and cars are not as photo-realistic as you’ll see in the latest Gran Project Forza titles. There’s no hiding that this is a ten-year-old game that’s been given a spit and polish to look sharper on modern gaming systems. If you have a really enormous shunt, you will be reset with a freshly-rehabilitated car on a nearby piece of track, but you will lose more time and may not be heading in the right direction. If it’s merely a massive accident, rather than the complete destruction of your vehicle, you will be able to carry on with minimal loss of time (and no adverse effect on your car’s performance). And the crashes are a visual highlight of the game – gloriously rendered in slow motion as you barrel roll across four lanes and into a concrete barrier. The cars travel at rather insane speeds around the city, so you will inevitably hit something sooner rather than later. Generally, the object in a racing game is not to crash, but Burnout Paradise is a bit different in that regard. But it’s surprisingly addictive, and I found myself thinking “just another ten minutes” several times as I pulled up to another set of traffic lights for “just one more” race across town. It sounds quite simplistic and I completely expected the novelty to wear off after the first 20 minutes or so. You can perform stunt challenges, run other cars off the road, crash through billboards, hunt for hidden shortcuts and more. You can race against other cars from point to point, choosing whichever route you like to get to the finish line. There are plenty of other rock tracks as well). There are various different challenges you can either choose to take on or simply ignore as you power around the streets of Paradise City, complete with the Guns N’ Roses song of the same name as the soundtrack (no, not on continuous loop. But it matters not one bit, because the gameplay is fast and frenetic and you are having too much fun to notice. The cars are not licensed versions of your favourite Ferraris or Porsches, they are simply copies or products of the designers’ imaginations. You have a large open world of roads to explore, and a succession of ever-faster cars to race and crash. There are probably sounds business reasons, but for driving game fans, the only reason that matters is because Burnout Paradise remains as much laugh-out-loud driving fun as it was ten years ago.
So why all the effort to resurrect a game that’s a decade old? The result is Burnout Paradise Remastered, which brings the original game to a new audience on the latest Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One audiences. In addition to the original game content, the Remastered version also gets nearly all of the previously-released downloadable content (DLC) and support for the latest ultra-high definition 4K screens running at 60 frames per second. Clearly, someone at Electronic Arts noticed this as well and picked up the phone to Criterion Games in Guildford, who had produced a much-loved title called Burnout Paradise a decade ago.Ĭriterion reopened the Burnout Paradise files and set to work. Whilst the Gran Turismo/ Forza/ Project Cars titles are all very worthy and challenging, they’re not exactly aimed at casual fans who just to have some fun and wreak some virtual havoc.
Ever-heightened levels of processing power have led to developers trying to produce ever-more realistic driving characteristics and infinite opportunities to tweak settings to suit your own preferences. Driving games have been very serious affairs for quite a long time.