You’re hunched forwards with your nose inches from the screen, your controller creaking under the strain of your white-knuckle grip. Your eyes are stinging, your mouth is dry, your throat is parched – you daren’t even blink, and it’s been a whole two minutes since you last remembered to breathe. On screen your car – a smoking, sparking, four-wheeled blur – is weaving in and out of traffic at something like 400mph with only a handful of pixels separating you from spectacular, glorious, cataclysmic disaster each and every time you swerve. Your eyes are fixed in concentration, your heart is pounding, your adrenal glands are doing somersaults. This fantastic, sweatsoaked experience is what Burnout is all about. Unfortunately, it’s not one you’re likely to have playing Burnout Paradise.

Why not? Because Burnout Paradise has more in common with Need For Speed than with any other Burnout game. In fact, Burnout Paradise has more in common with Need For Speed than Need For Speed ProStreet does, which is weird. When it was first announced, Criterion promised that Burnout Paradise would be a total reinvention of the Burnout series – a classic case of ‘if it ain’t broke, break it’ if ever there was one, especially considering that reinventing Burnout in the image of Need For Speed is like claiming you’ve reinvented the cake, only to unveil a perfectly ordinary pie.

And we’re not done milking the cake/pie metaphor yet either. It can also be used to illustrate the differences in structure between what we hitherto knew as Burnout and what we hitherto knew as Need For Speed. Burnout, like a cake, is designed to go straight to your pleasure receptors with a multi-layered sensory overload of excitement and immediacy – and its sweetest treats have potentially the most damaging consequences. On the other hand, a pie, like Need For Speed, is a big open space filled with stuff – it’ll leave you feeling satisfied, but quite bloated. There, that wasn’t forced, laboured or overstated at all, was it?

What we’re trying to say (between huge chomps of delicious baked goods) is that Burnout has gone from being a well-structured, tightly designed game, to being a big, wide, open one that’s just sort of… there. Everything in previous Burnout games was very deliberate; purposely geared towards a specific goal – to have you racing by the seat of your pants every single second you were playing it. The principle was simple: take risks and you earn boost, earn boost and you can go faster, go faster and there’s more risk, which means more boost, which means more speed, which means more risk, and so on. The best rewards, and most exhilarating experiences, were attainable only by pushing this idea to the limit; escalating the risk, boost, speed principle as far as it would go. And previous Burnout games were carefully crafted to make the absolute most of this, with very little being left to chance. The circuits were the way they were (wide tracks, long straights and sweeping bends) for a reason, and the density and type of traffic at each point of each track was predetermined, as was the timing of its movement in to (or out of) your path. There’s a tendency in the current gaming climate to automatically dismiss pre-scripted events on the grounds that they’re linear, artificial and limit gameplay possibilities, and indeed they sometimes are and sometimes do. But without pre-scripting you wouldn’t have had a heart-stopping near miss on every single stretch of track like you did in previous Burnout titles. Instead you would have had something patchy, clumsy and haphazard. Something like Burnout Paradise.

Paradise City is one of those ‘persistent’, ‘natural’, ‘living’ sandbox worlds, and Criterion would have you believe that setting Burnout in such an environment “gives the player full control.” But it doesn’t. Just because Criterion exercises very little control over the way Burnout Paradise is played, it doesn’t automatically follow that you have “full control”. It could, and in this case does, mean that there are some things that no one really has full control over. And those things could, and in this case do, include ensuring that the game is a riveting, challenging, adrenaline-fuelled experience throughout. So what Criterion is calling ‘giving full control to the player’ is actually more like ‘not bothering to design the game properly.’ The whole persistent, freeroaming city thing might seem impressive at first glance, but really the hardware is doing most of the work there. The time and effort on the part of a game’s designers is supposed to go into structuring and balancing the game; making sure that the player is both challenged and rewarded, and that he is making progress, facing higher stakes at each stage. There isn’t much evidence of this kind of hard work at all in Burnout Paradise, but there are more than a few traces of cop-out and compromise.

Aside from the main events, which come in four types – the familiar Race and Road Rage, plus Stunt Run (perform stunts for scores) and Marked Man (standard pursuit evasion) – there are various bits and bobs to be collected all over the map. Smashes, billboards and super jumps will present no surprises if you’ve ever played a sandbox driving game before, but the way collectable cars work is kinda novel. Winning some events will unleash a special car somewhere onto the streets of Paradise. Find it and take it down and it gets delivered to your junkyard where you can go and pick it up then go through the whole pointless exercise of taking it to an Auto-Repair before entering any events. You always have to drive to a junkyard to change car, by the way, but they’re only actually junked the first time you get them.

The game’s structure, at least what little structure there is to speak of, works like this. You start in a junkyard with a battered car. Before you do anything else it’s advisable to get your motor fixed at an Auto-Repair shop. The name Auto-Repair is somewhat ironic seeing as it would be a lot less tedious if your car was auto (as in automatically) repaired before each event. Anyway, you can explore the whole of Paradise City from the very beginning of the game. Every junction in the city marks the start of a different event. To start an event, you simply drive to the relevant junction and spin your wheels, which, if the event you want is on the other side of the city, is a much slower process than simply choosing it off a menu or map. If you fail an event and wish to try it again, you have to drive all the way back to the start point. There are no quick restarts. If you win an event, you get a point on your licence and once you have the required number of points, your licence will be upgraded. It’s at this point that the ‘structure’ gets really lazy. Does a newly upgraded licence give you access to all-new, exciting features and experiences? Does it bugger. Quite the opposite, in fact. Earning a new licence simply resets the map, un-completing all completed events and setting a new, higher points target for your next upgrade. So instead of a completely new set of challenges, you’ve got the same old ones again, only a bit harder. If that sounds a bit rubbish, that’s because it is.

But the cop-outs and compromises don’t end there. There are two further problematic upshots of Burnout’s new sandbox style. First, it isn’t possible to predict where traffic is going to be, and second, it is possible to go completely the wrong way during a race. Instead of responding to these considerable inconveniences by putting the brakes on its commitment to open-world design, Criterion has instead made sacrifices in other areas. So, to ensure that the unpredictable placement of traffic doesn’t cause frustrating, impassable obstacles there’s now a lot less of it, and to counterbalance the whole ‘wrong turn’ issue the AI has been dumbed down and crashes made much more forgiving. As a result, the only way to lose is to get badly lost, but even then you’re still in with a chance. Crashing is no longer much of an issue, driving skill doesn’t count for much, and there’s no real point in taking risks. It’s all about accurate navigation. So much so that we soon learned it was a good idea to slow down well in advance of junctions to make absolutely sure we went the right way. A Burnout game where it’s advantageous to slow down!? Do we really need to say more?

Yes, we suppose we do. Especially seeing as there are actually some positive things to say about Burnout Paradise. The overall presentation is excellent, and the visuals and physics are of the highest standard, even if they are both far too realistic to be in a Burnout title. Plus, as a whole it is still kinda fun in an aimless dicking around kind of way, especially online, where it works well as a social game thanks to good PlayStation Eye support and strong competitive and co-operative modes. But do you really want to spend the best part of £50 just to dick around? Maybe you do. Maybe you’re a Need For Speed fan disillusioned at ProStreet’s new direction. In either case, Burnout Paradise is probably well worth a shot. But fans of the Burnout of old, and anyone else looking for a tight, focused arcade racing experience will likely be disappointed.

Gavin Mackenzie