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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Skate

I've only played it twice, but I can tell you this now: I love this game. I’ve always been a fan of the Tony Hawks series, but I only ever played it on the PC, so I was a bit apprehensive of learning the controls to Electronic Arts’ Skate. But it’s fantastically simple, and the tutorial on the demo is easy to follow. The FlickIt system works a treat, and is easy to master.

Graphically speaking, it looks good – but please bear in mind that this is only the demo version that I’m trying, which means that I’m restricted to staying within the recreation ground. And, of course, the lack of HDTV obviously impairs my judgement. But compared to Tony Hawk’s 3 – the last skating game that I played – the graphics are fantastic.

The demo has an annoying 30 minute time limit, and then after that you need to reboot the game and redo the tutorial, which is tedious once you know what you’re doing.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the full copy of this game, and get customising skaters, boards and tricks, and exploring the vast city that is promised.

My rating: 7.
Will I buy the game: Definitely.