Burnout Paradise PS3 Preview

The demo for Burnout Paradise came to the PSN and Xbox live a couple days ago. Sure, you might think it's just a demo, so what's the big deal?

Well, I have never played any of the Burnout games before, but I have been following this one for some time. My one friend talks about the older ones and I have heard nothing but good about them. This article is a preview for Burnout Paradise on the Playstation 3.

So I downloaded the demo and started to play. You don't have any choices for cars; they give you a beat up older muscle car, which actually isn't all that bad of a ride. The map is considerably restricted (obviously) because it's a demo, but it gives you a nice taste of Paradise City.

There are a couple different "races" that I have found, but there might be more. One is a burning route (get from point A to point B) and the other is a regular race with other cars. The first time I tried one it was difficult because I did not know the map and I had to keep constantly looking at the mini-map in the lower right corner, causing me to crash several times. Once you get used to the layout of the city, it is much easier. You will find more and more shortcuts that help to avoid traffic and cut down time.

What makes this game really amazing is the crashes. In an older article of mine I said how DiRT was great when it came to crashing cars. Burnout Paradise tops DiRT in my opinion.

When you are flying down the road and you clip an oncoming car, it feels, and even sounds like it really happened. During the actual crash there will be tons of particles flying everywhere, sparks and all sorts of crunched metal. If your tires don't fall off most of the time you can just drive away, obviously with considerable damage. Once I crashed and my front left tire was caught and couldn't rotate. It dragged along the pavement leaving a giant skid mark and caused my car to be a lot slower. The crashes are a huge part of the game and really make it more enjoyable.

There is also an online portion in the game, believe it or not. You drive around with 3 other people performing stunts, racing and even taking each other out. I must have played this for two or three hours yesterday, it is a ton of fun. It does have some problems that I have noticed though. Some of the A.I. cars randomly disappear from the map, headset volume when talking to other people is really low, and the whole takedown aspect seems buggy. Sometimes you will barely clip someone and it counts as a takedown. It is something that needs attention for the final build of the game.

The game itself looks really good. What's even better is that there are no frame rate drops. The game runs really smooth and even connecting to a room in the online part is insanely fast.

I can say that if you are looking for an arcade style racing game, look no further. Burnout Paradise drops in middle to late January, and I think it is a must have game.