After playing this game for 100+ hours, I re-review Burnout Paradise

    Burnout Paradise is the fifth game in the critically acclaimed Burnout series, and for the first time, you have a free-roaming city to race in.  An engine built from the ground up for the "next-gen consoles" is used in this game.  Including spectacular crashes, impressive framerate, and more.

    Gameplay or "fun factor."  This game is extremely enjoyable for the first 20-40 hours.  Within those 20-40 hours, you get high-speed thrills, incredibly fun car combat, and more.  But that’s in the first 20-40 hours, I’ll talk about what happens after that later...

    Graphics.  The graphics are very nice for a free-roam racing game.  But it has an annoying bleached out feel to it.  It’s always a dawn/dusk setting, and you will grow tired of it in about 15 hours at the most.  The city is small which doesn’t help.  The crashes look really good though, but there’s one problem with the crashes.  The car always wants to barrel roll, and I mean BARREL ROLL, it won’t stop, it’ll just keep on going and going.  The cars themselves look okay, although the fact that they aren’t super detailed, and there’s no driver, is a problem.  Plus no pedestrians and no drivers in the traffic vehicles.  Makes the city feel empty.

    Sound.  Now here’s something I don’t really have an criticism about (not counting music).  The car sounds, and the crash sounds are absolutely fantastic.  And really sound quite real.  The car sounds are really impressive for fictional cars, they all have their own sound really, and I can easily imagine one of those cars appearing in real life.

    Music.  This is something I’m not too sure about.  Besides all the Burnout music, the music isn’t really that good.  There are some great ones, like Paradise City from Guns ’n Roses, but all the others are...  Let’s just say, bad.

    Multiplayer.  There’s some great fun to be had here.  With some really entertaining co-operative and free-for-all challenges.  Just taking down other players in the city is really fun too.  But the races themselves are quite bad, due to the takedowns being messed up, they play like a rip-off of the Midnight Clubs.

    Singleplayer.  Now I’ll continue what I said about after that 20-40 hours, once you get your Burnout License, there’s nothing to do.  Zilche, nadda.  All you can do is just drive around finding billboards, fences (yeah, I said fences), and super jumps.  Which you could do already, and are not fun to find.  So there’s really no replay value at all singleplayer wise, which is really disappointing.

    Controls.  Criterion has got it down yet again.  With almost, if not just plain perfect controls.  You’ll feel quite confortable with them very quickly.

    Overall.  This is a good first try at the free-roam racing genre.  It has a lot of issues, like awful replay value.  But if you really, really want a free-roam arcade racer, go ahead and pick up Burnout Paradise.  But if you can wait, wait until September for Midnight Club: Los Angeles.  It is extremely unlikely that it will disappoint.