Okay, so I know Burnout Paradise isn’t mechanically perfect. It has a few problems that I think are a little annoying and could be easily fixed, namely the lack of retry, the lack of a user-settable beacon in online mode, and the awkward introduction of new cars in your junk yard. But I don’t care.
Burnout Paradise is the perfect game on any kind of macro-level. I’m not even necessarily talking about the nuts and bolts here even though they are absolutely top notch– blisteringly ridiculous graphics, great sound effects and music, incredibly tight controls, blah blah blah who cares.
This game is the most forward-looking, connected, incredible piece of design on the market. Nothing on the market today save glimpses of what I’ve played of the LBP beta even comes close to what Burnout Paradise provides in terms of user experience. No game has come so close to capitalizing on every feature a console has to offer as Burnout Paradise has with some exceptions on the DS and stuff.
I played this game back in January when it came out and I just bought it on Saturday off PSN– another reason why this game kicks your ass. It might as well be a totally different game.
Criterion completely reworked the menu front-end, added unspeakable amounts of content completely for free, and dropped the price by half in eight months. By contrast, look at the support Capcom has given Devil May Cry 4, a game that launched around the same time. No new levels, moves, characters, enemies, nothing. Nada. No reworking of the game’s busted features and the like. Kind of besides the point. It’s not expected. Criterion has gone above and beyond.
No game connects players to one another like this game does, and that’s basically the entire design of the game that makes it so incredible. The divide between being online and offline is basically nonexistent. When you’re offline, the game constantly feeds you information about what players all around the globe are doing, and when you’re online, you’re being hit over the head (in an incredibly elegant way!) with information on your Freeburn partners. Offline and want to go online? You can do it by hitting right on the D-Pad twice. There is seamless and then there is seamless and Burnout Paradise might as well be Jesus’ burial gown.
Is there any game as fun as this game in multiplayer? No, there probably isn’t, and if there is, it must be dopamine-assisted. Criterion manages to turn a huge city into such a tightly knit, cozy playground for a number of players by constantly feeding you information on statistics that consistently motivate you to play with other people.
I just don’t know what to say about this game. It’s almost like everyone that reviewed it in January might as well go back and just say, “Well, add 20 to whatever we have it in January because there’s big heaping piles of new content for free and the game is like amazing and we were wrong for not giving it a 10!” Everything is so ridiculously impressive, from the graphics to the presentation of those graphics to the presentation of the presentation graphics, to the way the game’s sense of speed feels like you’re riding a roller coaster while you’re playing the game, it seems like they did nearly everything right. And when you consider the technical accomplishment Criterion achieved in addition to completely overhauling everything about what we THOUGHT we knew about Burnout, this game is just ineffably good.
So, sure, it has some problems. But the design of Burnout Paradise is without equal, its support unrivaled, and its sheer outrageousness grows with every update.