Late to the Party: Burnout Paradise

Playing Burnout Paradise has reminded me of two things, 1) why I only buy one racing game a generation and 2) that Crash mode really made Burnout 3 for me.

I've enjoyed my stint with Burnout Paradise, and a lot has been said about its innovative approach to driving games and online mode, and a year later re-iterating that would be a waste, so I'm going to touch on a couple of the things that are causing me to move away from the game.

The first is that it has the typical racing game difficulty curve. I started out defeating the AI opponents easily, with the matches then becoming a more even challenge. Then I seemed to cross a line where I could win one out of every 6 matches. This happens to me in nearly every racing game, but typically it's attributed to rubber-band AI. In Paradise's case, it just becomes too fast and too open to handle. The AI knows a route, if not the best route, to the finish line, but I only know the general direction and am often traveling far too fast to hit my turns. This is probably just further affirmation that open-world games just aren't for me.

The other problem is with people. Burnout Paradise's online mode truly is innovative, but without a good host it just goes nowhere. I've had on online session with a great host, and it really proved everything good that was said about the game, but every other match was just boring. I really wanted a button of some sort to just initiate a vote to getting some kind of challenge moving, to force the hosts hand.

Overall, it was worth $30 and I had a good time after work for a couple weeks, but I think if I had spent $60 at launch I'd have been disappointed.