Burnout Paradise Preview

21 Apr 2008 at 18:34:54 by Paul Younger

There is something we have learnt about the team behind the Burnout series; they have the imagination to innovate along with the common sense and understanding how not to break their game. If Halo is all about preserving and developing that 30 second encounter between two foes on the battle field, Burnout is about the adrenaline of the almost-crash. The series has grown up around this simple concept of taking driving to the edge, and then often plunging over it with spectacular consequences.

Today we have in hand a preview of the next game in the series, Burnout Paradise. As you might expect innovation abounds, and we again wonder if Criterion has taken a step too far. Gone are the restrictions of prescribed routes and circuits, you now live and race in an open sandbox world - Paradise City. Along the way, the barrier between single and multiplayer games has been removed. You can seamlessly invite online friends to join you in the City. Innovative certainly, but is this embracing of an open environment going to dilute that joyous focused crash-fest we have grown to know and love so well?

A bit of background will help put this all in context. You can make sense of the each Burnout release by the innovations they brought to the table. The first release, Burnout: Point of Impact, introduced us to the idea of reward for dangerous driving. This was followed up by Burnout 2: Maximum Impact that wrote their danger vs. reward concept large through each and every street, not to mention the ingenious crash junctions mode. The game encouraged ridiculous speeds and proximity to other cars by enabling the player to chain burnouts together. The faster you went the more likely you were to crash, but the bigger the reward. Then came Burnout 3: Takedown, planting the impact and thrill of crash junctions squarely in the main races. You could here literally crash your opponents from the track, and be rewarded for your success. Burnout 4: Revenge, managed to stretch the danger still further by letting drivers crash civilian traffic, nudging them into the path of competitors. It also turned up the heat by rewarding you for returning the favour after being shunted from play by an opponent.

This, apart from the consolidatory Legends and the backward glance of Dominator's re-inclusion of chained burnouts, is the lustrous history of Burnout 5: Paradise. True to their game's risk/reward moniker, Criterion has taken a few risks with their number one franchise. Accordingly, again mirroring their game, they have hit the mark each time and been rewarded handsomely for their risk.

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