Monday 31 Mar 2008

The difficulty Criterion have had since Burnout 3 is how to top what they’ve done before. For this, the first “build-from-the-ground-up” high definition Burnout, they at least had the power of the PS3 and Xbox to help in that regard. The differentiation they have achieved comes through four main features: no load times, a High Definition graphics engine, exploration and general fooling around as an important game mechanic, and lots of online features including exploration and general fooling around.

Did I mention that there are no load times?

You can finally consider loading screens in Burnout a thing of the past. In Paradise the only one you see is the one when you turn your console on and the game loads. The way they accomplished this is by taking a leaf out of GTA and Need for Speed Underground’s book – a streaming, persistent world. Criterion have designed a city from the ground up for you to drive in, and everywhere you go the game is constantly loading up buildings and roads in the distance, in the background so you never notice. This, combined with a much higher level of detail in the environments and cars and a commitment to 60 frames for second, explains why EA are not publishing the game on any platforms other than PS3 and Xbox 360.

The network of roads in Paradise City is great fun to explore – the city is meticulously constructed full of shortcuts, ramps, tunnels and hidden away areas. There are billboards to destroy by driving through them (120 of them), super jumps to find and ramp (50 of these) and gated off areas to smash (400 smashes!). The size and uniform inventiveness and quality of the city make exploration a constant joy and a welcome change of pace between the events.

To start with you are given a car, a basic Stunt car. You drive it out of the junk yard and must get it repaired before attempting any races, so you drive to the nearest Auto Repair. A quick drive through this building brings your car to pristine condition and you’re now ready to race. So, you find the nearest intersection, stop your car and hold accelerate and brake at the same time to start the event for that intersection. A quick description of the event follows and then you’re off in just a few seconds. When you finish that event you carry on driving from where the event ended and scout around for another intersection where an event starts from.

Huge Variety in every area

There are five different event types: Races require you to get to a destination first out of a number of cars; Road Rages require you to take down a target number of cars by ramming them into walls or other cars within a time limit; Marked Man events require you to reach a destination before your car is destroyed by a team of maniacs out for your blood; Stunt Run events require you to reach a set number of stunt points before the clock runs out by chaining together jumps, barrel rolls, flat spins, boosts, slides and whatever else you can conjure up. Finally there are Burning Laps – each of the base cars has a specific location where their Burning Lap starts from, and the goal is to reach a destination within a set time limit. The game play within these events is classic Burnout – there really isn’t anything new here except Marked Man, so it’s hard to say that the persistent world has helped the in-race mechanics at all. The biggest change since Revenge is going back to the Burnout 3 style mechanics without the constant traffic-checking – here if you hit traffic you almost always wreck your car.

There are three types of cars in Paradise, the main difference between them being how they earn boost. For those new to Burnout, boost is the staple resource in Burnout: using it makes you go faster and you can’t win races without it. To earn boost in any car you can generally drive dangerously. Stunt cars earn boost quickly by doing jumps or spins which makes them ideal for Stunt Runs where having a big supply of boost helps chain stunts together. Speed cars can only boost once the boost gauge is full, and if you use it all in one long boost you’ll get a refill (but only if you’ve earned some boost while boosting). You can chain these “Burnouts” endlessly as long as you don’t stop boosting and don’t crash. Aggression cars earn more boost by taking down rivals, and their boost bar is much bigger. Essentially, Speed cars are for Races, Aggression cars are for Road Rage and Marked Man events and Stunt cars are for Stunt runs – but generally you can use any car for any event without too many hassles, and you’re likely to find a personal preference between them. Each car also has speed, boost and strength stats, so the variety between the 75 cars is impressive.

The pros and cons of a persistent world

Although loading screens are a thing of the past, driving off to your intersection of choice to start the next event can take time. It can be quick if you finish a race in the downtown area of the map as there are a huge number of events that start in this area with its abundance of intersections, but if your race finishes up in the mountain you’ll face a long drive back down the mountain to find a new event to compete in. Criterion have very specifically designed Paradise City to feel like a real place, and they don’t let you skip a single section of the road if you need to get somewhere – you have to drive everywhere. Sometimes the city just feels like a complicated menu. Of course, it isn’t really a menu, it’s a living, breathing city with traffic, alternate routes and traffic lights, but sometime I just want to select an event and race without having to load the map, decide on an event and then drive off to the start of it.

By creating one single world to race in a massive exploration element has been added, but dropping into a race is more onerous. It’s swings and roundabouts – the immersion factor that is gained means a loss in structure and the simplicity of having a list of events to compete in, so whether you like “sandbox” environments is going to play a big factor in how much you take to Paradise. I do think that Criterion may have taken immersion slightly too far– there are two cases where I would dearly like to lose a bit of “realism” to save time and energy spent doing “work” as opposed to racing.

Firstly, if you want to change your car you will have to drive to the nearest junk yard. To start with only one is marked on your map (when you find locations like junk yards, gas stations and events while driving around they will get added to your map), so changing your car could mean driving all the way across town. Even when you’ve found all of them, with only five locations they’re normally a good minute or two away. At times in the game as you’re exploring a rival will appear, and taking him down will earn you his wreck. I’m happy to go to the junk yard to pick up the new wreck, but once I’ve had it fixed I would like to be able to change to using it at any time.

The second case where Criterion have been a bit too purist for my liking is the inability to restart an event. In most events if I was losing by a mile I would be happy to just give the event up and find a new one nearby, but when you’re trying to do the Burning Lap for a car that’s not an option because they start at a specific spot. So, miss your Burning Lap target time by 1 second and you have to drive yourself all the way back to the start to give it another go. It’s like a cruel joke played on drivers in the name of immersion.

In spite of these niggles, it’s impressive that there is no menu to speak of in Burnout Paradise. Everything you can do is directly accessible while you’re driving your car around. This brings its own problem – I kept playing hoping I would unlock the crash mode (called Showtime here) and the Road Rules mode (which involves attempting to beat set times in driving from the start of a road to its end), but it never happened. I looked in the manual for what these modes are or how to activate them and I got nothing. It’s rather strange that a significant portion of the game is not announced to the player in a conspicuous way, unless it was by the voiceover at some point and I missed it. I did try to listen attentively even when DJ Atomika was being annoying. In the end I had to search the Internet to find out what they were. Please developers, put stuff like this in the manual! Another early frustration for me was not knowing how to cancel an event – if I happened to take a wrong turn in a race, or worse, select an event I had already completed, I had no idea how to cancel the event and do another. I would duly drive to the destination and then go on my merry way looking for another event. It turns out you can cancel an event by stopping your car dead for about 5 seconds – another brilliant idea to enhance the immersion, but not one that is ever communicated to the player.

Paradise is in desperate need of a GPS, or Google Maps

I have to warn you, the potential player, about one more thing – when I first entered Paradise City I found myself having to look at my map all the time, often taking wrong turns that lead in the opposite direction to my destination. It took a little dedication and persistance, but things did improve as I came to understand the basic layout of Paradise City. I wish there was a better form of in game navigation than the rather undetailed map. Another level of zoom would help tremendously, and I would have liked the game to track locations I’ve found like the Quarry or the Parking Garages. For races, perhaps a GPS-like system that spoke to you while you’re driving would help more than street names appearing at the top of the screen. Having to navigate while you’re driving at high speed and at the same time avoid crashing is difficult, and will continue to be until I know Paradise City better than I know my home town. But while it makes Paradise more difficult to get in to, it also means that it rewards extended play. Those first few hours can be frustrating, but pass them and the depth of play becomes evident in the huge variety of things to do. There is always something to keep you occupied, and every little bit helps towards 100% completion – no mean feat in any Burnout game.

Burnout Racing is still oodles of fun

I haven’t mentioned the online modes which are comprehensive and available from directly in the game just by pressing right on the D-pad. There are co-operative challenges for groups of up to eight players which makes a very welcome change from competitive racing. Of course, the normal online racing types are there, but just exploring Paradise City with friends, finding those last few billboards you missed or attempting to all do a double barrel roll together offers something that isn’t found in most driving games.

Paradise is a truly worthy successor to the great PS2 Burnout games. You can’t help but admire the beautiful Paradise City and the developers for sticking to their vision of a highly immersive persistent world. The staple Burnout sense of speed is here in spades while the crashes are even more spectacular with impressive crumple physics on display. If the few frustrating facets of this overworld system can be mitigated with a bit of compromise from Criterion, I look forward to the next city they construct. And let’s pray they don’t go all underground on us. And let’s also hope that EA improves their Trax one day.

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Contributor:	Peter

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