Burnout Paradise - first impressions

EA’s Burnout Paradise is the latest instalment of the very successful driving-fast crashing-hard franchise from Criterion, the makers of the Renderware middleware. I’ve just had a quick look at this iteration of the series. It looks gorgeous, in its pseudo-lit millions of sparkly non-anti-aliased polygons way, the worlds and cars are well modelled. But this time round they’ve opted for a GTA-style game structure. You are free to roam around the Paradise City at your leisure, enjoying the scenery maybe or crashing through the various destructible object types. There are no set races, tasks or challenges. The free-roaming pick-a-fight gameplay sounds like a great premise and here’s how it works.

Pull up alongside someone at a set of red traffic lights and look to your left expecting to see whoever behind the wheel, a foxy chick reapplying her glossy lipstick? a gang of cider-swilling a.s.b.o. teens, a two-points-left-on-his-license drunken has-been out for a late-nite cruise?, over-rev your engine (agree a race type) and YOU’RE OFF.

But there are no passengers (or drivers) in the Burnout Paradise cars.

This has never bothered me before but here, with the new GTA format, it seems amazing that at least one of the game’s designers didn’t go through this glorious ‘at-the-lights’ scenario in their head. And it’s triple weird because you can bump the door of your car off its hinges with a near-miss maneouvre (which looks great from the regular driving position) but sliding the camera round you’ll see there’s no-one inside the car.

I mean, even Gran Turismo now has drivers in their cars. Additionally, isn’t it what we all wanna see in such a ‘car-crash simulation’ title? Reckless drivers’ and hapless passengers’ faces carved open as their ragdolling bodies plough through the front windshield on impact? Babies flying out of hijacked cars onto the hard shoulder gravel churning up the butter-soft skin? Necks snapping back with a horrible crunch as airbags explode? Spectacles buckling? False teeth popping out? Ruptured bodies hanging half out of ruined cars, crushed by secondary collisions? Bodies burnt alive, kicking and screaming at a buckled door that won’t open? Gallons of blood and oil spilling across an intersection?

Clearly, some producer at EA went, “GTA is a very succesful franchise. We can make Burnout Paradise even more succesful by adopting their free-roaming ethos, right?” But the whole point of GTA is there are people behind the wheel. Hell, there are people on the streets. Scared people running away from your reckless driving!

Burnout Paradise is an empty city, a characterless city, a ghost town haunted by phantom cars that drive by themselves. Actually, it’s not even that that bothers me, the Paradise City’s just an expanded track with obstacles, it’s the lack of drivers/passengers that really gets my goat. Look inside any slightly damaged car, the steering wheel doesn’t even go left and right when you turn the wheel. Characterful drivers could have added ‘another level’ to this otherwise excellent driving/crashing game. Maybe EA were just hoping no-one would notice this minor detail.