While I’m not a huge driving game fan, I was pretty excited about Burnout Paradise. Any game that focuses on what I do best in racing games (crashing) has to be a winner, right?

Let’s start with the good stuff that this game does. The graphics are superb. Absolutely gorgeous, with decent frame rates thus giving the game a feel of “realism”. The city feels like any metropolis area, just without all the police harassing you for speeding, reckless driving, running red lights, hit and runs, and I’m sure there has to be some man slaughter thrown in there as well. Honestly for probably the first half hour, I just drove around the city trying to get a feel for the handling of the car and the layout of the city…Ok that’s actually bullshit, ’cause I drove around the city at insane speeds smashing things and trying to wreck my car in the most fantastic manners. The game does a replay of each of your crashes in slow motion so you can see the crumple zones pushed to their limits. Amazing…

Due to the lack of police enforcement, you get to drive around the city at insane speeds doing what I would essentially call quests. At each stop light, if you hit your break and gas pedal (you know so you can “Burnout”) you activate a given quest. The variety of these seem to be pretty decent, having found 4 or 5 different types in the first hour of play. My personal favorites are the “tag” style of gameplay, which falls into two categories; the try to avoid being smashed and the smash the hell out of the enemy racers. While I tend to win the smashing the opponents out of my way quests, I rarely win the the races. Races seem to vary on distance and number of opponents faced. I raced one guy in the mountains, but inside the city the races tend to throw up to 8 other opponents against you. Racing in Burnout is either win or lose, even though I’ve come in second place a few times (and not just in the one vs one races either ) it’s still considered a loss. Overall, the quests are fun, smashing is great, and doing jumps are awesome.

Finally, I have to give kudos to the soundtrack. As posted back in December, the list of artist and songs are all songs that make you want to either drive faster, or drive faster and smash the hell out of things. In both regards, while I don’t necessarily like every song, the controls for changing the radio are a simple click on your bumpers.

Now for the negative side of the game. Even in the first hour of play, I could see a sort of repetitiveness growing in the game. Essentially the game has a leveling aspect to it in that you are trying to upgrade your license class by getting points awarded for winning quests. When you upgrade your license, you get new cars available to your junk yard. I believe that as you get points along the way, other cars become available to you in the form of other racers who are zooming around the city. If you take them out, you get their car.

Within the first hour, I had 6 cars (4 from opponents taken out and 2 from getting my starter and class D license), and while I still get the exhilaration of smashing the hell out of other cars, I find that the drive to keep playing is diminished by the redundancy of doing the quests over and over.

Another negative point, yet also a positive point, are the cut sequences of the crashes. While these are incredibly done, they quickly become laborious without anyway to either skip or fast-forward through them. In the beginning they were awesome, but as you play the game longer they become tedious and repetitious. In fact, they are a pain in the ass when you take down a fellow racer since they cut away from your racing action to show you the damage you just caused to your opponent, then thrust you back into the race…

Finally there is the lack of a speedometer. Ok, I admit there could possibly be an option that I haven’t turned on, but come on when I’m racing around the city it would be nice to know that I just T-Boned that guy doing 120mph! A small detail, but a glaringly obvious detail that would make it all the better in my opinion.

Overall the game is awesome. I can’t wait to try the game online with my buddies (I am concerned that we might be in completely different parts of the city all the time) and see what sorts of damage we can cause. I’m also still very curious to see what cars will become available and how they will handle. I predict that I’ll have a good time with it for another week or two, then it will be on it’s way back to Gamefly.

Overall rating: Rent it!