Burnout Paradise

Bring a friend?

Unfortunately, awesome and jaw-droppingly beautiful as Burnout Paradise is, there’s still a chink in the armour.

Multiplayer.

Multiplayer used to be the cornerstone of the Burnout games. If you had trouble completing some of the harder levels then it was just a case of grabbing a second controller and kicking back for a bit until you were ready to try again. Online and offline multiplayer were both excellent.

The problem with Burnout Paradise though is that the offline multiplayer is completely absent. None. Zip. Zilch. This is to say, there isn’t one.

If you want to game with a friend at all then you have to take the battle online. This isn’t as bad as it may sound to some though and if your console is online then it’ll also download the Showtime high scores for each stretch of road to help bring some constant, casual competition to the mix.


However, nice as the online multiplayer is and as easy as it is to get into and take to the streets for a Road Rage match, offline multiplayer is still something we want. Online is all well and good, but if you can’t turn around and smack your opponent’s head with the controller then it isn’t real multiplayer.

One thing that is to be specifically commended though is the way the online game is integrated into the offline game. Getting used to the different controls may take a little while, but once you’ve got the hang of it then dropping into a multiplayer mash-up is only a matter of button presses. Ten seconds wait and you’re there.

The PlayStation 3 version of the game pushes ahead of the Xbox 360 version in one regard – SixAxis. Motion sensitivity can be turned on in one of two ways. SixAxis steering is the most obvious one for simple street driving and I had great fun using one hand to steer whilst I ate my lunch – potato salad my girlfriend made the night before and a packet of crisps, just so you know.

The other way that SixAxis can be enabled is for mid-air steering, handy for when you plunge into a bit of Showtime or want to try for a Drive away.


Admittedly, SixAxis does feel like a bit of a gimmick at first – especially when you use it for regular steering. Thankfully though, unlike in games like Lair, the SixAxis is responsive enough to be a legitimate control method if you really prefer it and the mid-air steering method is particularly fun.

Conclusions

Burnout Paradise is, by far, the most open and interesting Burnout game we’ve ever played. Playing past Burnout games has been a very linear experience and getting stuck at a certain point, unable to get the 400 takedowns needed to progress within the space of two minutes, could be a major bummer.

Paradise gets rid of that annoyance with an extremely elegant solution, re-designing the entire game so effortlessly and naturally that you might struggle to believe that there was ever a Burnout game that wasn’t like this.

Does it have flaws? Yes, clearly. The most major one is obvious when you fail a race and have to hike back across the entire map in order to restart – a simple quick-travel or retry function would have been a welcome addition. The same is true when players want to change their car and have to spend a while hunting down one of the five junkyards on the map.

Still, ignore that and the lack of offline multiplayer and Burnout Paradise is clearly a new highpoint for the series. Sure, it’s annoying not to be able to fight your friends up-close, but for a game this good it’s something we can learn to live without and, honestly, we’re far too addicted to the Showtime gamemode to say anything really bad about this otherwise excellent game.