Burnout Paradise: Ultimate Box Review
A great arcade racer, Burnout Paradise makes it's debut on the PC with a wild crash accompanied by rock music
The city and outlying area that you are given to drive in is filled with shortcuts, smashable billboards and stunt jumps. Smashing through any of these during a race, however, will not earn you credit – so there is some incentive to drive around and find all these items to smash. There are 150 or so billboards to find, and figure out how to smash; along with around 300 shortcuts to find, all marked with a yellow fence which gives you credit for finding the shortcut once you break it. The events that you do to progress your career can only be found while free roaming as well, so some exploration is pretty well necessary to advance.
Once you’ve found enough events, it’s time to start racing. All events in Paradise can begin on any of the hundreds of intersections throughout the game world, however they all end at one of 5 finish line locations. It works well enough, but at times you feel that it may get a little repetitive racing the same stretch of road multiple times just to end up at a different finish location. The event types for races include: Marked Man, where you are given a destination to get to, and the catch is that there are 3 or 4 strength cars with a sole purpose of trying to take you out. Race is a usual race against X number of opponents to get to the finish line first. Burning Route is a usual time trial, getting from one location to another within a set time limit. You can also enter a free crash mode at any time during free roam, which will launch your car into the air and you must string together as much crashes into pedestrian vehicles as possible, with bonus points going to busses and larger cards. It looks weird, but it can be somewhat fun at times. There are also challenge races like taking out a specific number of opponents within a time limit, or racing one on one to one of the finish lines for a car unlock. All of the races are set in the open world, so you’re free to either follow the AI cars or make your own route to the finish line. Just know that you will only have yourself to blame if the shortcut you took ends up on the completely wrong street and you have to restart the race. You can unlock cars by winning special one on one races as mentioned, but the rest of unlocks are clever. Rather than just delivering cars to your garage after you’ve won a required number of races, you are told that a new car is now cruising the streets of the city – you must find it and take it out to add it to your garage. The rest is up to chance, as you have to free-roam for a few minutes and wait for the car to speed past you. You then give chase and take it out to unlock it for yourself. It’s a fairly clever and entertaining way to make you race for your new cars. One thing to note of the gameplay is that it is easy. There is no difficulty setting, and though I am being a bit bias since I’ve played Burnout on PSP, but it is way too easy to take down other cars competing with you. A mere tap on the side will send them flying into the side railing, and chances are you will get taken down very rarely during the course of the single player career.
As part of the Ultimate Box, the PC users have access to all the console DLC released while the game was console-exclusive. The day/night cycle is good and certainly helps the game feel more natural. You can even set the game’s clock to match your own, a feature often requested for its sheer coolness. The motorcycle DLC is also included, although it’s merely 4 bikes. The bikes handle quite a bit differently than cars, they have no stats other than speed and they go quite fast. During crashes, the bike rider simply disappears and you see the bike slide across the asphalt for a few feet. Unspectacular, to say the least. In fact, it almost feels like the Bike DLC is rather cheap addon that should have been free to console users of the original game – it adds little and feels unpolished. The DLC patches also include the “Restart Race” option. How the console users struggled without it for the past year is beyond me – after each failed race you’d have to drive all the way back if you wanted to try it again. The last DLC package is the party pack, which allows for quick action, pass-the-controller type gameplay. It will definitely enjoy more success on the consoles than on PC.
The single career is lengthy enough to keep you occupied for many hours, even if some of those hours is grinding the same races over and over. There are a lot of things to do, cars to unlock and new challenges to find, and with all the DLC content included, it’s a great bargain. However, there is very little reason to start another career, as you’ll just be going through the same motions each time. On the multiplayer side, the lobby is pretty seamlessly integrated into the game, however the lack of LAN option is rather disappointing. After you create your EA account, you can jump into any event from a filtered search list, or see what your friends are playing. It’s a pretty straightforward EA lobby system. At least online the difficulty curve will go up, as takedowns actually require some skill to execute and your opponents actually pose a threat.
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