Burnout Paradise
Half as nice?
You'll also notice other tweaks, like the ability to drive through an Auto Repair station to repair your vehicle, or the Gas Station to refuel your boost meter. Both are helpful additions that mitigate potential frustration when the heat is on. For example, the all-new Marked Man [watch it on Eurogamer TV] event is a hugely likeable point-to-point affair where the idea is to reach your destination without being smashed to pieces by pursuers. By keeping Auto Repair station locations in mind, you can get yourself out of a tight spot, no matter that your damage is critical and the screen has drained of colour to indicate your imminent doom. Elsewhere, Stunt Run tasks you with pulling off "outrageous manoeuvres" by drifting around corners, barrel-rolling off ramps and performing combos to reach a points-target. However, sometimes a quick visit to the Gas Station at an opportune moment will give you extra boost just when you need to hit that nearby ramp at top whack. And so on.
One extremely cunning and thoughtful element of the new approach to Burnout is how each part of Paradise City and the events within them have been tailored to the types of vehicle present - Speed, Aggression, and Stunt. For example, a car with high Aggression stats might well be perfect for ramming cars off the road in Road Rage events, but hopeless in Stunt Runs. A speedy car may well be great for races, but will be a bit feeble for Marked Man events, and so on. Using the right car for the job is essential - a point DJ Atomika is keen to stress when you fail an event yet again. Tearing through the undulating countryside in the more barren Western sections of the city, you'll learn, is much better suited to Stunt-savvy cars, giving you the chance to take full advantage of the many ramps and Super Jumps hidden away.
Who needs Paradise, I'd rather have you
To keep you involved, Burnout Paradise has you try and improve your driving licence rating, and, in turn, gives you better cars to drive. To rank up, you have to win a certain number of events, and Criterion gives you the freedom to meet that target via a combination of whichever events most appeal to you. So, for example, if you're not really a fan of Stunt Run events, and have more joy with Marked Man and Road Rage, then that's up to you. However you want to race your way to an upgrade, the game doesn't force you in any given direction. Rather like Burnout Revenge, eventually the stakes are raised to reach the next tier, so you will have to start attempting more of everything over time, but no longer are you bound to meeting star-ratings to get there. If you win a race, job done. If you reach your destination in Marked Man, all good. You won't be forced to do re-runs of everything to reach Perfect ratings, but to compensate for that there's generally a lot of other stuff you can spend time with, which is very much a good thing.
The replacement to the inspired Crash mode of old is the new Showtime mode [watch it on Eurogamer TV], which you can, bizarrely, activate at any time by holding down some shoulder buttons. At that point, the idea is to smash into as much traffic as possible, but not in the manner you might expect. In Showtime, you earn boost by hitting other vehicles, and when you hit the tarmac you can basically bounce yourself back up by using the Ground Break manoeuvre, therefore making it possible to keep the momentum going by hitting more traffic, earning more boost, and therefore more Ground Breaks. Hitting buses is the key to the really big scores as they grant you a multiplier, but given the random nature of the traffic flow, it's often down to blind luck as to whether enough buses appear. The whole thing is completely bonkers, obviously, and it's fun to try and top your best score, but I can't deny that it's really no substitute for well-designed, challenging Crash Junctions of old. Incorporating Crash Junctions (as they were) into the new game might not have worked, but binning one of the best parts of Burnout is a pretty hefty sacrifice.