Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 84
 PARADISE LOST February 1, 2008
J. Black (Panama City, FL)
9 out of 13 found this review helpful
As a huge fan of the Burnout series, I regret to say that I am extremely disappointed with this new installment. What is truly sad though, is to think of how good this game COULD have been. The visuals are outstanding, the speed is amazing, and all the while the frame-rate is as smooth as butter. Paradise also boasts smooth controls and a pretty good soundtrack. But if you loved the previous Burnout titles be prepared for a major shock... or several, as a matter of fact. Here are my biggest complaints:
1) No Crash Mode. Here's an idea: Lets take one of the series' most memorable and beloved features and give it the axe. Yes its totally nixed. Why? Who knows.
2) No "Retry" option. Yes you heard me correctly. If you screw up you CAN'T RESTART THE RACE! Which leads me to my next complaint...
3) Backtracking. Just lose a race? Oh well, you'll just have to drive the five miles back to the starting point. What? You can't find the starting point again?
4) Awful navigation. It is way too easy to get lost, and there is no way to instantly "Jump To" an event or location. Furthermore, the mini map is fixed. Anyone who plays open-world racers knows it is much easier to have the map orient itself to the direction of the car.
5) No "Quit Race" option. Oops, I didn't want to play THIS race. I guess I'll just have to meander about until the timer runs down.
NOTE TO THE DEVELOPER: Thanks for taking a perfectly good series and screwing it up. You were so busy trying to jump on the "open-world" BANDWAGON that you forgot why fans really loved the Burnout franchise to begin with. If gamers want to play "open-world" racing, they play Midnight Club, Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Test Drive Unlimited, or one of the many others out there. If they want fast paced arcade style action, and the ability to quickly browse through events they play Burnout... or used to anyway.
 disappointing. January 26, 2008
P. Lee (CA United States)
8 out of 11 found this review helpful
i preordered this game and played it as soon as it arrived. i'm a huge fan of all the previous burnout series (they're just so awesome and fun to play). this game right off the go has great graphics and music is ok. but this game is a big letdown.
reason 1. no split screen. so if you want to play multiplayer, it's on either xbox live or lan with another xbox. you can't do split screen like the previous game.
reason 2. the menu system is totally confusing and though it looks "cooler" graphically, the interface is counterintuitive.
reason 3. not as fun as they've changed some of the dynamics of the game physics (ie crashing into the rear of cars at higher speeds, etc). they've made things a bit more realistic as in actual damage rather than allowing me to just plow through at any speeds and such.
reason 4. did i already mention no split screen? i think i got the most fun out of playing it with someone else right next to me, like takedown races.
two stars overall because first person is still fun, but the fact that multiplayer has been greatly reduced to nothing dropped the rating down big time. i went back to playing burnout revenge.
good rental game but i jumped on the preordering bandwagon because of the previous successes with the burnout series.
Don't Waste Your Money on This Game January 28, 2008
Wilfred Bryan (Athens, texas United States)
8 out of 14 found this review helpful
I have been a burnout fan and owner since the first burnout game. Every game in the series has been a improvement. This game is like a bastarized verision of a once proud series. I have been looking forward to this game since it was anouced over two years ago. Here is why, I don't like.
1. It's very hard to find your way around. The open world Sucks!
2. One minute your in the middle of the event and the next your not.
3. Where are the arrows to guide you where your going?
If I wanted to play game in the style of Midnight Club, I would have bought it instead.
4. No Crash Mode.
5. You can't crash into anything any more. With out destroying your car.
That was a majority of the fun for me.
I played this game for 10 minutes before deciding, that this was awful.
I feel like this game cheated me out sixty plus dollars.
Now if you want to spend 60 dollars to look at product placement and great graphics this game is for you.
I'm going to be renting the next one first.
I would think twice about this game. Maybe there was something to the constant delays after all.
[Scream of Rage] April 17, 2008
Brian Seiler (Tomball, TX USA)
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
I hate this game. I cannot express in words the degree to which I hate this game. If this game were a person, I could run it down with my car and not feel the slightest twinge of ethical concern. I hate it so much it leads me to forget things that I've been trained to know are right and good and simply shout expletives in its general direction for the next few hundred words. Fortunately for this game, I'm not quite that much of a jerk.
Imagine that you took Test Drive: Unlimited and the last decent Burnout title, smashed them together, and then carefully excised everything even remotely fun from the mangled monstrosity that resulted. There, my friend, you have found Burnout Paradise. Everything about Revenge that entertained me enough to keep from snapping the disc in half and tossing it into traffic has been removed from this game, and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anybody.
One thing that I can't fault the game for is its appearance, which is certainly a step up. The game is definitely beautiful. Driving through Paradise City, you get to see a lot of different environments, and every single one springs off the screen and directly into your face like some kind of carnivorous monster. When it comes to useful visuals for the gameplay, however, there's some problems with the level of detail included in the game's environments - specifically, I have a hard time figuring out where the bloody road turns in some locations. This is worst in the downtown areas and best on the outskirts of town, but ANY time I miss my turn because it doesn't look like there's a road there at all, somebody needs to yell at the graphical designer.
The game sound is mostly unremarkable, so let's not. It won't make you physically angry, and I guess that you might like the soundtrack (I personally loathed roughly 80% of the included music, but that's not atypical for me with an EA title), but it's not going to pleasure you sexually or make you reevaluate your life.
My problems with the game all have to do with the gameplay, or, rather, the lack thereof. If you've played Revenge, you might remember fun modes like Traffic Attack or Crash Mode. Those were pretty terrific, right? Well, they're gone. Not only are they gone, but some of the fundamental rules that you would have learned from prior games in the series have been utterly invalidated. The big one is the rules on What Kind of Traffic Causes Crashes. In Revenge, they had a simple rule - if you could see headlights or it was a truck, you would wreck into it. Otherwise, you knock it to the side. I don't know what they replaced that with, but I DO know that in the first hour I played, I wrecked against no fewer than ten cars stopped at intersections, smaller than me, facing away from me.
Of greater concern is the bald stupidity that comes from building an open world street racing game in a world that nobody has ever been to. If this game were set in San Marcos, TX, I'd be all over it because I KNOW WHERE THOSE STREETS ARE. I don't know where anything is in this game and the game doesn't do anything at all to help you learn. I'm faced, as a newcomer, with the choice between spending ten hours losing hard just to learn where everything is (not fun) and just plain losing because I don't know where anything is (also not fun). Closed tracks are fun because it's hard to get lost. I got lost in three of my first ten events in this game and ended up on practically the wrong side of town. That's bad.
I could go on for a thousand more words, but I won't belabor my point too heavily. The game has been well received, and maybe it's just me. Maybe people who like "open world" style games will find something to enjoy here. I didn't. I found Test Drive to be a better implementation of the idea. With limited modes that mostly feel identical, no Crash mode (seriously - Crash mode was a puzzle game and that was FUN; Showtime is entirely random), undirected gameplay, poor layout, and any number of other problems, this game would have to come with chocolate cake and my own personal supermodel before I would even consider recommending it. There's a lot of potential for an open world Burnout game, but this isn't the game to realize that dream.
 Mucho Good, some strange January 22, 2008
Garrett Westphal
7 out of 12 found this review helpful
Though I did not buy it from Amazon (Sorry :( ) I ran out and bought this gaming loving the demo. The gameplay is awesome, it looks fantastic. But there are a few things that were taken out that were in the other Burnout games... Like custom soundtrack and split screen multiplayer. I have Xbox Live so it's all good, but I can't play with my friends who come over and just wanna sit on the couch and race each other. Now it probably said somewhere that there would be no split screen, which I only found out after buying it and it does indeed bother me. And the whole no custom soundtracks is also kind of annoying. The music in the game is cool, but driving around the John Powell's Bourne Soundtracks is pretty sweet. The menus in this game are also a little weird and too crazy looking.
In sum, I like it, it's fun and worth picking up. Because really, it's all about driving incredible fast and smashing into something and watching it in slow-mo with these beautifully crisp sound effects of the car crunching up.
Oh, and no drivers? I know it's rated E and having a rag-doll driving getting smashed up within your car or flying out the front windshield may be a little graphic, but it does bother me when your doors get smashed off and you're left with a possessed car.
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