It unfolds like a sprawling, multi layered labyrinth, with everything from roads, to shortcuts, billboards, traffic, and obvious and not-so-obvious markers acting as cues for where the player can go and what they can do. This is instantly apparent with Paradise City, which the game takes place in and is named after- Paradise City is a monument of game design, one of the best, most dense, and richly designed levels ever. The thing that Burnout Paradise, however, does, which those games do not, and which allows it to easily surmount and belie its age, is just how fantastically well it is designed. Heck, even racers do that today, including Ubisoft’s The Crew, Microsoft’s Forza Horizon, and EA’s own new Need for Speed games. An open world racer? With persistent social elements? What’s the big deal, exactly? Every game does that today. The flipside of that is, where Paradise may have been a revelation back in 2008- and for all its divisiveness with its fanbase, it was- it can come off as a little ho-hum and trite today.
And it did this all back in 2008- in many ways, the game was so far ahead of its time, the market probably didn’t properly appreciate it back then. In a lot of ways, booting up Burnout Paradise reveals just how ahead of its time the original game, which came out over ten yeas ago in January 2008, was- here was a game that went fully open world (long before the present movement to open world games industry wide began), and with persistent social events and online gameplay, in the vein of games like Monster Hunter, Destiny, and The Division. " In a lot of ways, booting up Burnout Paradise reveals just how ahead of its time the original game, which came out over ten yeas ago in January 2008, was." And now, the market gets another shot to let it shine. Burnout Paradise may not be the most beloved Burnout game- in fact, due to its open world nature, as well as its removal of the beloved Crash Mode, it is arguably the most divisive one- but it is a Burnout game nonetheless, and that means it is fantastic by definition. Well, it’s unclear what happened, or even what the future holds for them- but what is clear is that Burnout, at least, gets another lap under the sun, even if it is on a track we’ve already seen it race on. How had the same developer who had given us one of the most beloved franchises of all time come to this? Criterion first got pulled into making Need for Speed games- which they did, and they were fine, albeit not as good as Burnout– and then, they got pulled into… what, exactly? The studio was reduced to providing support for other studios, becoming a shell staff, if that. For some reason, Paradise was the last Burnout game EA released.
Burnout as a franchise was the king of the hill.Īnd then it all ended. Its follow ups- Burnout Revenge and Burnout Paradise– were fantastic in their own right, too. It mixed tight controls, incredible track design, and a frenetic sense of speed with an arcade game like sensibility, and led to a game so gloriously addictive that it is yet to be topped. Burnout 3: Takedown is, in my opinion, inarguably the greatest racing game ever made.