Burnout Paradise

The demo of this game is absolutely fantastic. Now I’ll tell you straight: I’ve never played a Burnout game before – I was generally put off by the box art, of a burning car tumbling recklessly out of control. In hindsight, maybe I should’ve played a couple of them games…

So it was with an open mind that I downloaded the demo version of Burnout Paradise from the PlayStation Store.

The game starts wonderfully, explaining that although this is just a demo, you can still race, perform jumps, smash through billboards and even race online. Cool.

You can only drive one car in the demo, a bashed up stunt and jump car. It’s a great car to drive, and once you find a repair shop (which you are directed to anyway) it’s restored to it’s original glory. You can even find a paint shop and change the colour, but only one colour change is available in the demo. I’m not sure how this will work in the full game – do you have a choice of the colours or not? Let’s wait and see.

Handling wise, the car is superb. It’s rocket-fast, and easy to slide and drift around corners.

The demo has a fairly big map to explore, in which you need to find 34 yellow gates to smash through, which is exhilaratingly fab, 15 billboards to smash, and 6 insane jumps to find. I’ve not played on it excessively, and have therefore not found all of the above. My fave? Driving into a multi store car park, and launching off of the roof.

The graphics are phenomenal too, albeit blurred by the speed at which you travel.

To start a race is easy – pull up at a set of lights, accelerate and brake at the same time, and you’ve entered the event.

Equally, getting online is simple – just a case of using the right button on the D-pad. It’s surprisingly easy.

Two things that I’m not keen on, but could get used to: No navigational arrows – you’ve got to work out the route yourself, which isn’t a great difficulty, but I personally found the mini map hard to read at blisteringly fast speeds. There is a navigation system of sorts – road names appear at the top of the screen, indicating how close you are to a junction. But take your eyes off the road to read them, and you’re likely to wreck the car.

The second thing that I missed sorely was a speedometer. I love to be able to glance at the speedo and think, “Yeah, I’m blasting around streets at 220mph – unlikely!” But there was no speedo, which left me feeling a bit empty.

I love the slow mo effect when crashing, it’s stomach churningly realistic.

My rating: 8

Will I buy this game: Definitely.

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