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dkirschner's Burnout Paradise (PC)
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| [August 25, 2014 09:49:48 AM]
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"Beat" this yesterday, which is to say that I acquired the Burnout License, which took an additional 40 or so wins. Credits roll here.
Not much to say...the game is fun, but the longer I played, the smaller it felt. Every time you upgrade your license, all the events you've discovered reset, so you can get credit for winning them again. You basically do the same race, marked man, stunt and road rage events over and over and over, driving between the same 8 locations around the city.
The more you win, the more cars you unlock, which is the only real sense of progression besides upgrading your license. But since upgrading your license and acquiring cars requires simply winning the same events over and over, it actually doesn't feel like you're doing much of anything. A fast, shiny, destructible treadmill, really. Case in point: After acquiring the Burnout license, you can get the "Expert" Burnout license by...guess what?...doing ALL the events on the map..AGAIN! Yay!
I did discover the classical music and EA's electronic tracks in the soundtrack, which are a billion times more preferable than the painful pop hard rock that the series sells. Unfortunately I never figured out how to silence "DJ Atomica," the irritating radio host who pipes up with inane comments from time to time. What this game desperately needs is (a) the ability to play your own music, and (b) the ability to silence DJ Atomica. I would enjoy racing around Paradise City so much more if I could do these two things.
I screwed around online a bit, but it's not very exciting. Get dropped in an open world with a few other people and drive around together. You can complete some stunt challenges together and maybe race each other, but nothing I would care to do unless I knew the person.
That's that. What's next in the queue?
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| [July 28, 2014 07:11:28 AM]
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A surprising change to the old Burnout formula. This is the first open world Burnout game, though the world is disappointingly small. It takes place in fictional Paradise City (cue Guns n Roses ad nauseum), which is 1/2 city and 1/2 mountain roads. On the one hand, it's nice because I'm learning my way around pretty good, learning shortcuts, turns, locations of important things. On the other hand, I've already driven back and forth across the entire city like 20 times already doing races and other events.
The word that jumps out at me to describe this game is "grindy." It's like a car MMO. Like many (older?) racing games, your progression goal is to upgrade your license. You start with a D license and must win x number of events to upgrade. I think so far it was D -> C (8); C -> B (15); B -> A (26). I'm working on getting the A right now and have 9 or so more. Last night I sat down with the game for a couple hours and, really, grinded my way through the C and most of the way through B.
Events are handled in an interesting way. In old Burnout games, you just select events from the big map. In this game, you discover events by driving around the city. Every traffic light has an event that gets added to the map when you drive through that intersection. You start an event by going to the intersection and pressing brake and gas at the same time.
One big letdown is that there is no crash mode! There's also no aftertouch takedowns! These were two things I LOVED about previous Burnout games I've played. I can understand why crash mode is gone, because that would be tough to do in a constantly moving open world. Like, when you start events, it doesn't phase you to some preset section of the city where traffic is arranged just so. No, you just start a race, and other cars come blazing from behind you.
But, there is the very cool addition of stunt mode. Paradise City has a huge emphasis on shortcuts and stunts. In stunt mode, you try to match a score, like get 50,000 points of stunts in 2 minutes. There are multipliers like jumping through billboards, doing super jumps, getting big air time or doing barrel rolls. I like this mode a lot because it's just awesome to find some of the crazy routes in the game and chain together jumps, billboards and the rest.
As usual, the sense of speed is intense, especially with the speed class cars (there are even classes, like an MMO, haha). Each class (speed, aggressive and stunt) has a different type of boost bar. One of them is normal, I forget, but speed is interesting. You can only boost when the bar is full, and if you stop boosting, the bar goes to 0. However, you can chain boosts, so if, while boosting, you get a takedown or drive the whole time in oncoming traffic, the screen will flash "Burnout" and your boost gauge will fill up, letting you continue boosting. One time I got Burnout x 4, which was awesome.
That's the gist of the game. There seems to be robust online play as well, and I will likely check that out sometime. But that's all for now!
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dkirschner's Burnout Paradise (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Thursday 24 July, 2014
GameLog closed on: Sunday 24 August, 2014 |
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This is the only GameLog for Burnout Paradise. |
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