I’ve been going on a Burnout frenzy since I got my 360 back, spending a good number of hours in both Burnout Revenge and Burnout Paradise. After putting about five hours into Burnout Paradise, I’ve decided that it’s just not as good as Burnout Revenge – even after all of the free DLC and updates.
For those that have never played the Burnout games, I highly recommend them as I’m not a driving game fan but I really love Burnout Revenge. The Burnout games are definitely less sim and more arcade, and reward you by driving more aggressively and destroying opponents’ cars by forcing them into walls, trucks, etc. Burnout Paradise eschews the traditional racing game structure of Burnout Revenge and other racing games by switching over to a full open city.
In Burnout Paradise, you drive around the city and can pull up to most intersections to start one of the races that also take place in the city. I’ve yet to play the multiplayer, which can probably lend itself to some fun with you and some buddies all driving around the same city, but from a single player standpoint, this open world interaction for a racing game is just superfluous. It’s like the PS3′s Home compared to the 360′s Dashboard – bloated and unnecessary when you want to get to the real content (I’m also worried the Halo 3 ODST campaign may play out similarly).
I’m a lot more critical about timesinks in games these days since I have so little time to play. Do I really enjoy driving around the city looking for the next race to participate in or to change my car for the right race type when in Burnout Revenge I could have just selected the race and car from a menu? It seems like the only “benefit” that came out of this open world is to allow for hidden collectibles (ramps to jump and billboards to break), which in and of itself is just fluff anyway. From what I remember too, the developers remarked that there would be no loading time in this open world but there is plenty of loading before a race starts or when you’re changing your cars (it’s quite noticeable when you’re changing cars).
Burnout Paradise isn’t a bad game, but it’s definitely not as good as its predecessor. Besides the lack of benefits coming out of switching to an open world interface, several gameplay features and racing modes that were present in Burnout Revenge did not carry over to Paradise, which result in an ultimately less enjoyable racing game. I’ll most likely jump back to Burnout Revenge for my Burnout fix in the future.
