14 DAY TRIAL // 
Since car crashes and speedy races are always linked to heavy rock music, we'll take some time out and remind you the lyrics: "Take me down to the paradise city, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty" belonging to Guns N' Roses and featured in the song "Paradise City". Well the girls may be pretty and the grass may be green, but we're more into takedowns, Burnout's trademark car-crashin' scene. All of you PS3 and Xbox 360 owner rejoice, as you're about to witness the rebirth of the Burnout series, courtesy of Electronic Arts and Burnout Paradise. The game will be made available on January 22 2008 in the US and on January 25 in Europe, so there's more than a month's time of waiting till then.
However, you might as well go and play the game's popular demo, made available by those fine EA folks. Keep in mind that it's one of the few game demos that allows online play, so get online right now and start downloading it through your PSN or Xbox Live. What's Burnout Paradise all about? Well, picture Test Drive Unlimited with a twist and what a twisted feature it adds... Curios? Hit the acceleration button and read on!
Collision Paradise City is a completely open world and an environment that's ideal for racers and crashers alike. The way the action's introduced to you is not as fancy as the one in NFS: ProStreet and all of its urban legends and racin' groups. Things are pretty straight forward in Paradise, as it allows you to kick some metal behind right from the start, without too much of an introduction. The game relies heavily on online play and virtual communities of racers and Burnout fans. Paradise's main feature is the fact that it doesn't feature big loading times or any type of lobbies or complex game menus.
The title offers you the chance to crash whenever and wherever you like. For example, I've cruised throughout the city randomly crashing cars that were part of the traffic, for fun. In order to start a race you'll just have to stop at one of the 120 traffic lights in the city and get ready to compete against a couple of speedy fellows. Since this is a PS3 title we're talking about, the new controller comes into play, so this may be the first time I've said "bye-bye" to the conventional control system. We've become trigger-happy and we don't even know it... The Xbox 360 joystick started this trend and now the SIXAXIS controller continues it, allowing us to accelerate and brake with the good old trigger buttons, L2 and R2.
Meanwhile, the X button will only be pressed in order to boost the speed of your car. The famous Crash mode has been rebranded and it's now called Showtime mode, that's triggered when you pull both...triggers. You might imagine that only racing in a huge town tends to limit the number of challenges you can take part in. On the contrary, Paradise managed to surprise me and you'll understand what I mean, once you'll find out that the game features up to 16 checkpoints per race. Multiply that by 120 and you'll get...well more than the actual number of checkpoints, but still enough challenges to keep you busy for a long long time (specially in winter time).
Cars will deform superbly getting compressed or get dismembered in the most original ways, but you won't realize the magnitude of your atrocities, because you won't be able to relate to real-life car models. Burnout Paradise's cars are fictional ones, but they're vaguely based on vehicles that we Top Gear fans adore. You'll also get a chance to tune your rides or change their color as you play. The latter is done by passing through a specially designed location and getting an instant paintjob. Do the same speed run through a gas station, in order to get a major boost or go through a repair shop to get your car fixed immediately.
See a car's attributes in order to decide if you want it or not, but for now the demo only allows you to start with a beat up car. Among the vehicle's stats, speed, boost and strength are included and they are vital for your choice of ride. As you play the demo, you'll notice that a subtle tutorial is helping you get accustomed to the game's basic features. There's a map on the right side of the screen that you'll always keep your eyes on, as it shows the other racers, a small part of Paradise City, plus repair shops, gas stations and various rendez-vous points. Knowing these landmarks sometimes isn't enough, as you'll see by discovering various parts of the environment that can be accessed by mistake or as a bonus, like gates with a yellow sign on them or various big ads plus those cool ramps you can use all the time.
Burnout relies heavily on its boost, however I was surprised to see that the difference between the car's behavior at top (normal) speeds and the one during crazy boosts is very small. I may be getting used to driving with the boost on... In case you've never played Burnout, temporary speed boosts are achieved by pulling stunts, like passing near an oncoming car, drifting, performing cool turns, or taking rival cars out. The more dangerously you drive, the more boost you get and the more boost you get the bigger the chances are that you're drive in an insane way. It's your way or the highway after all!
Multiwrecking experience What's single player in a game like Burnout Paradise? A mere fly in another fly's eye... if you ask me, but go ahead and ask the folks who don't have access to a decent Internet connection. They'll badmouth you a bit and go back to playing previous Burnout installments. Paradise features the Easy Drive system, which is exactly what the name says, an extremely easy way of driving around, in multiplayer mode, while joining online challenges and befriending other Burnout fans. Just hit the right D-pad button and get ready to join a session of hardcore crashes and car tormenting action.
Before doing that, you'll take a short while to create a profile and even post a pic of yourself, created with the aid of the PlayStation Eye or the Live Vision in the case of the Xbox 360. Paradise also sports a cool Mugshots feature that instantly makes the PS Eye take a picture of you and one of your opponents and allows you to exchange the photos. The cool thing? They're taken at the time when you pull a takedown and wreck his car! See the look on the man's face when his tuned ride gets uber-trashed!
I'm not sure that the radio I kept listening to while I was playing the game's demo was streamed at the exact time of the play, but the "DJ" of Crash FM makes a swell job of entertaining his listeners. He even promises to say your name out loud if you send him an email and state why you're the best crasher around. Picture that: a DJ announcing your rivalries and the other folks (from another country) playing the game getting to hear that you're the best. While in the Easy Drive mode, you'll be able to check out news related to the game or join a Freeburn online session. You'll create or select challenges, ranging from stuff like meeting up on a roof and causing rampage to getting high scores out of flying from a ramp nearby (with your car of course).
Burnout Paradise keeps the fire burning between the opponents that face each other in the virtual universe, encouraging fierce rivalries. If you perform a takedown on someone, he'll maybe become your mortal enemy (and start cursing you through VoIP, but that's no biggie). For example, if you set a new record for car jump length or oncoming distance and someone breaks it, a huge colored message will appear onscreen, telling you who broke your record. Once you take him down, break one of his records or do something nasty to the guy, another huge screen will remind you that this is some sort of payback and that the rivalry has been settled.
Once he hits back (again) yet another big message appears announcing that the rivalry has been reignited. And so on, till everyone hates everyone (virtually) and all players have broken the records of their nemesis. There's no major record to go for, as each street, ramp and minor challenge has its own limits, ready to be broken again and again.
Video Burnout Paradise is a great title, when it comes to gameplay, but the graphics don't manage to shine and reach the same level of almost perfection. Electronic Arts tried to deliver the same graphics of the previous installment adding a next-gen look to the cars and environments, but they sacrificed weather effects and day/night cycle, probably because loading such a huge world in real time through an Internet connexion becomes a real pain. Still, crashes look great and the crash animations seem countless, as you can have your car flying for long meters, rolling on the street and getting deformed around some pole or wall. Too bad that the game is based on online play, this causing some serious lag, but that may depend on the player's connection more than on the game's characteristics.
The demo of the title's PS3 version only allows you to play with a Hunter Cavalry, a speedy stunt ride, that manages to look good even when it's wrecked and ready to explode. Speaking of which, violent collisions will surely make your day in this Burnout installment, specially when you'll see three or four supercars battling it out at top speed and "avoiding" the near miss and turning it into a full frontal contact. Paradise City looks well enough to make any GTA environment envious, being as urban as it gets, suburbias included, plus tons of obstacles, endless roads and great looking streets and buildings.
Sound I didn't pay much attention to the rock songs in the background (but they were cool, still), since chatting with the folks crashing your car over VoIP is more fun. The game supports this feature and it's really cool to get to know the people you're racing with. Other than that, I'm a Burnout OST CD owner myself, having bought all of the game's soundtracks so far. That pretty much covers the coincidence that makes most of the bands selected by EA for the game my personal favorite. Expect heavy and alternative stuff and not a moment's peace, when it comes to beats per minute. Passing to the sound effects, they rock even more than the soundtrack, so you'll get to adore the roar your car makes when it brakes, crashes, rolls over, gets scratched on walls or simply reaches huge speeds.
Conclusion Play Burnout Paradise right now, as watching YouTube gameplay videos and reading reviews will only make you crash you car, while drooling for some cheap adrenaline. I mean it folks... you'll never drive the same after having driven the Burnout way. Sometimes, the success of the game is measured by how much it manages to change real-life aspects. If Paradise turns you from a tortoise into a road daredevil, Electronic Arts is really worth all compliments. However, one should keep in mind that pulling Burnout stunts in real life pretty much equals death. I guess it's back to playing the game then and see you in January when the game comes out!
