I never encountered any major dips, and it’s encouraging to see that even though Paradise is a 12 year old game, the Switch can handle it very ably, especially in docked mode. The soundtrack is decent, although not as memorable as some of the previous entries, and is obsessed with playing Guns N’ Roses ‘Paradise City’ (do you get it?), which while a good song, does tend to wear by the 10th time you’ve heard it in a session.įortunately on Switch, it all runs wonderfully at a blistering 60fps. All of this content is unlocked from the beginning as well, which is worth keeping in mind, because it makes a lot of the original progression of the game kind of pointless (that is, racing and upgrading your junkyard cars to better levels as you rise to the top of the Paradise City scoreboards) given you have a lot of excellent DLC cars available to you at your garage at any time. While novel, it eliminates the puzzle element that was present for this mode in other games – having specially crafted traffic scenarios that you have to figure out how to exploit to get a high score – and doesn’t offer a lot of depth or replay value.īurnout Paradise Remastered includes all of the content and DLC from the original Burnout Paradise releases last-gen, which includes all the ‘Big Surf Island’, a small but welcome addition to the game map, Legendary Cars (like knock-off versions of Back to the Future‘s flying DeLorean and the Ghostbusters car), motorcycles, a dynamic weather system and day/night cycle. Now called ‘Showtime’, it can now be activated at any time at any location within the game. ![]() While there are plenty of event types, this was also a game that kind of lost the magic of the ‘Crash’ mode featured in previous Burnout titles, where you would intentionally crash your car into a busy intersection to create maximum damage and expense. The guidance and GPS system to find your way around Paradise City is also very basic compared to what we would consider acceptable in open world games today, and it can be hard to figure out where exactly you need to be going in a race without having played through it before. However, this still boils down to maybe six or so areas that look relatively similar, which lose a bit of variety as you get further and further into the game and start playing through the same routes over and over. There are several areas to the city to explore, from open freeways to tight forested roads around an observatory in the hills, to scenic harbour-side streets. Paradise City is an open world, with events lining its many intersections that you can stop and participate in as you level up your license and gain access to bigger and better races. The central gameplay conceit is immensely fun across the series, and something which even now still feels unique to Burnout, as it encourages you to become better and better at driving horribly.īurnout Paradise isn’t quite as pure a Burnout experience as the other games, although it has cool intentions that were ambitious for the time. Of course, you want to avoid this as much as possible with your own car, but encourage it with other racers, and slamming them into traffic or grinding them along the side of the road to take them out of the race is immediately rewarded as well. And when you mess up, you pay for it instantly, with gloriously realised crashes that end your path of destruction suddenly (although Paradise made these more forgiving with the inclusion of certain ‘Driveaway’ conditions). ![]() Driving on the wrong side of the road, into oncoming traffic and narrowly avoiding cars as they zip centimetres past your own, all of this fuels your car’s boost meter, which in turn lets you go even faster and drive even more dangerously. The Burnout series is all about going against every road rule and being rewarded for it – so long as you have the skill to match. It’s also a full $30 more than the other Remastered ports on PS4 and Xbox One, but at least you get a damn good port for your money. This was the game that took the series from individual races and crash puzzles and transplanted it into a full open city, and now it’s finally made its way to the Nintendo Switch. Since that high watermark, the series never quite recaptured its glory, but since then the only real kind of attention its received has been in re-releases of its last major game, Paradise. It’s a human tragedy that the series hasn’t made any kind of return in the decade since Burnout Paradise was released, because Criterion had distilled the perfect arcade racer formula in the precision, spectacle and destruction of Burnout 3: Takedown.
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