What do you get...

What do you get when you try to incorporate:
A. Elements of a free roaming sandbox game;
B. An arcade racer;
C. No real plot?

You get a steaming pile of poo called Burnout Paradise.

I've been a big Burnout fan since the beginning of the series but this is, by far, one of the worst to come out. The reason I included "no real plot" is because when Need for Speed shifted to a free roamer, at least it added plot elements. In Burnout Paradise, free roaming only exists so you can find events, billboards to crash, special cars to takedown (which usually appear within a mile of you once your notified they're out there 'somewhere') and jumps to do. To be perfectly frank, the "free roaming" of Burnout Paradise is nothing more than a large and elaborate (also pointless, lengthy and annoying) menu system.

What was wrong with the original formula of "Pick a style, earn stars to move up the progression ladder, blow stuff up, win cars"? Instead, they turn it into a piss poor "sandbox wannabe". And, in typical EA fashion, there are ads everywhere. Not just on occasional billboards which would be somewhat realistic, but.. everywhere. I find it amazing that there are so many CompUSA billboard ads in the game when CompUSA, shortly after the release of this game, shut down nearly every retail location for good.

Showtime mode is nowhere near as engaging as old Crash mode. While it's fun to rack up a big Showtime chain the first couple of times, after that it just becomes boring. In Racing events, I don't find myself caring about taking down my opponents anymore because it doesn't really matter as long as you find the fastest route to your destination. Road Rage is about the only event where Takedowns matter anymore; If you try to takedown people in Marked Man, you just end up with a very damaged car.

Which brings me to cars. Now I have to worry about 3 classifications of cars and go to a junkyard to get the best car for an event, repair my car (trashed by default) and then drive back to the event starting area? What the bloody fuck? Again, what was wrong with the old method of getting progressively faster racing/road rage cars and progressively stronger crash mode cars? Nothing.

This entire title wreaks of EA influencing Criteron Games to make Burnout more like Need for Speed, and, in my opinion, it's an abysmal failure. If I want to spend time driving around a fictional city looking for things to wreck and things to collect, I have GTA, Saints Row and Crackdown. Burnout used to be an awesome arcade racer that you could pick up and play for a long time or play for a little and then put down but still have fun either way. Now it's a frustrating pile of crap that tries to be too much - most of which simply doesn't fit in the Burnout "universe".

If there's another Burnout title, I hope for Criteron's sake they go back to the old menu driven, takedown/destruction laden system instead of this half ass "find your own route and then go do superjumps" system.