This Sucks

I don’t know if you know this, but Burnout Paradise does not have a retry function (UPDATE: It now has a retry function.  Simply press right on the D-Pad during the event you wish to retry). I say this facetiously, because it’s the only thing everyone (including me) bitched about when the demo came out. The reason for it being absent is not as much bullshit as I initially thought it to be. I’m still not entirely sold on the idea of removing it completely, because there are occasional situations where it would be very handy to have. But as part of an overall game design philosophy, I can understand why they did not implement it.

Up to this point, I have had a love/hate relationship with the Burnout series. I love the sense of speed and the amazing crashes, while the completionist in me hates the frustratingly difficult competition. I would repeat any event as many times as it took to either win it.. or throw the gamepad against the wall and break down into tears swearing I will never touch this piece of shit game again. With the latter result happening all too often.

Paradise breaks this habit. Since there is no retry option when you fail an event, your option is to either pick a new event near your current location or to drive halfway across the map to reach the one you just failed (if you can even remember where it started). I would say at least nine out of ten people are going to opt for the first choice. Especially with the way the game progresses. The goal of the game is to earn your Burnout license, you start with a learner’s permit and work your way up D, C, B, A, Burnout, and finally Burnout Elite. You earn license upgrades by completing a specific number of events. The number of total events available always outnumbers by a wide margin the amount of events you need to win to complete the license (except the last license which cruelly requires you to complete every event on the map).

Also aiding in the lessened frustration levels is a generally lower difficulty level compared to previous games in the series. Things have only started to get difficult now that I am working on the final license in the game. For all the talk about the missing retry function, I probably only failed about 6 or 7 events before getting to this point.

The free roaming aspect of the game is mostly irrelevant to gameplay in single player. This is because you’re likely going to stick with the route that they direct you through. There’s nothing stopping you from taking any route you want, but they indicate the turns that the game has calculated you should make. Sometimes there are shorter routes or off-road shortcuts but after playing 30 hours I still do better when I just follow the route the game has calculated for me.

That’s not to say that the open world design is unimportant to the single player game. It is a huge improvement to start every event within the game world rather than the barrage of menus and loading screens that previous Burnout games have suffered. And it just makes the game feel bigger, less claustrophobic. In multiplayer it gives you a world to screw around in endlessly. Today I played a game where we all decided to go on the roof of a multi-story parking lot and play close-quarters demolition derby. And if you have trouble coming up with ideas on your own, there are 350 challenges designed by the developers.

Some other miscellaneous things…

• Apparently this game has an annoying voice over guy named DJ Atomika that offers “helpful” hints while you play. I wouldn’t know. I turned him off, as well as EA’s selection of music, the first time I started the game. Then I slightly turned down the sound effects volume and pumped in my own music. I can’t imagine why anyone would not do this.
• I’m happy with the core driving mechanics. The ridiculously over the top traffic checking from Burnout Revenge is thankfully gone.  For the most part it feels right in terms of what will make you crash or not (though it depends on the car and can sometimes be hard to judge).
• Speaking of crashing, the new deformation physics are pretty sweet.  Stuff crumples up real good in slo-mo.  Now that I think about it all of these cars must be made of aluminum or something.
• My theory on the lack of a real Crash mode similar to the last few games is that they couldn’t figure out how to make that mode anything less than incredibly frustrating, as that’s what it always was to me. The new Showtime mode I guess is meant to replace Crash. You bounce your car around and try to hit other cars and especially buses. It’s alright, nothing special.
• Another thing this game really does right is it gives you an incentive to use all the cars you collect. Every car has a Burning Route challenge which is a simple point A-to-B timed race, completing it unlocks a slightly different version of that car. But mainly it’s just a good hands-on introduction to all the different cars in the game. Usually in racing games I just pick my favorite couple cars and use them exclusively despite owning 50 other ones. The cars in Paradise have a lot of variety and different uses.

That pretty much covers it.  It’s the best Burnout game, they did good.