Burnout Paradise Remastered

 Switch, Burnout Paradise Remastered (2020) game

On the GameCube I didn't discover many great serious racing games until some time after its lifespan, 'Burnout 2' quickly becoming a firm favourite as one of the first things I ever bought online with my new debit card - it turned into my number one game for the console, and one I played in multiplayer for years after (even, occasionally, to this day). It was mildly disappointing the series didn't continue on the platform, but I learned from the Nintendo magazine, NGC, I wasn't missing much. Even so, I always had it in mind I'd have liked to play further in that game's style (to the extent that in recent years I bought the original 'Burnout' which was either a launch game for the 'Cube or came out very early in its lifespan - though I admittedly have yet to give it a go), so when I was generously given a work friend's Nintendo Switch and looked through the copious list of of 4000+ games released, a new 'Burnout' was top of my list as an immediate pick up and play choice. It helped that I hadn't played a good car game for some time - 'Mario Kart Wii' filled the racing need earlier this year, but wasn't a serious racing game, and 'Starsky & Hutch' last year had some racing elements in an open world format, but still wasn't quite the same. 'Lotus Turbo Challenge 2' almost fits the bill a couple of years ago, but it was really 'Need For Speed Nitro' towards the end of 2022 that I last dove into this sort of game.

'Need For Speed' is a good comparison actually because 'Burnout Paradise Remastered' is much closer to that series than 'Burnout 2,' for better or worse. And I can think of a lot of the 'worse': the fact you have to spend so long driving to events, or even less pleasing, driving back from the countryside of White Mountain and Silver Lake on the far left of the map to get back to the main environs of the city where most of the events are situated. I understand the rationale behind it, it helps to learn the road routes and become familiar with the terrain and its hazards, but sometimes I felt like half my time was spent just driving back (without even a navigational aid like an arrow to show you where to go instead of having to check the map every time there was a fork in the road - more realistic, but less convenient), and while in the early stages I was simply enjoying the driving experience, before long it became an enforced chore. Chores were high on the list of hit points, too, as there are so many little accomplishments or lists of achievements to cross off that it could be wearying for the serial completist, to the extent I had no ambition to get all of them: I'd be satisfied with getting all the billboards and smashing all the fences (120 and 400 items respectively, even there!), unlocking all the cars and winning all the events, though ultimately I did dedicate myself to achieving 100%, at least in the main game (still leaving a number of challenges unbeaten), though was only able to complete 75% of Big Surf Island, originally extra material, but included from the start in this remaster (due to its requirement of completing online tasks which I wasn't interested in attempting).

Many hours were spent post completion of all events to track down the last billboards and smashes (both in a semi-hidden area of White Mountain), working out how to set off Showtime mode where you bounce around causing as much damage as possible, forcing myself to track down every last Super Jump I'd missed (which was the trickiest since it doesn't tell you which ones have been completed, to the extent I had to start noting down each one in a given area), and finally the Road Rules of beating or setting times and Showtime scores, so I had my money's worth! For those that absolutely adore living in this game world I'm sure they were happy to keep existing there and try to do absolutely everything, but although I enjoyed knowing the game so intimately by the end I was also relieved to finish. Still, it was somewhat dazing to find you were suddenly done (despite being a completionist I had to draw the line somewhere, so didn't bother with all the challenges which in any case don't count towards completion percentage), and, I suppose for want of a better word, 'free.' But it was designed as a self-contained world to game in, I can see that, which is why the emphasis on online gaming was so strong. I come to it from the perspective of someone out of a different time: up until a few years ago my most current console was the 'Cube, my most recent game on any system being 'Age of Empires III' for the Mac, so getting a Wii five or six years ago was the closest I'd come to modern gaming and naturally things have changed a couple of console generations down the line, but I remain a strict offline gamer with no interest in getting into all that so I can only judge this game from that angle and it was a major disappointment to me to find there was no local (split-screen) multiplayer option as I'd have got more from the title than I'm ever likely to without that. I understand why - it would be a technical challenge even for the latest consoles to open up an entire world for simultaneous play on the same machine, but couldn't they have cordoned off the 'tracks' to allow for this? Because there are tracks, despite the choice of routes and go-anywhere freedom, there are only a relative handful of endpoints to which you race, another aspect of the game that made it a little less universal in scope and a little more repetitive than it seemed at first.

While it's a game that only (only!), came out five years ago, and I'm coming to it at the very end of the Switch's lifespan (though it sounds as though Nintendo will continue their support for the original version even while Switch 2 rules the roost, so technically it's still a 'live' machine), it's also a remake of an even older game so I can believe technical limitations aren't necessarily showing off the Switch's capabilities to the full, even while it could well be more advanced than the original release, although I don't know anything about what differences there may be so I have to judge by what I see. And it did look very nice, the sharp shadows and changing colours of the sky as day and night cycle through (though I missed changing weather conditions from 'B2' - again, technical limitations may have been responsible), at the same time it's not quite as radically realistic as I might have imagined, almost more of a higher resolution version of 'B2's aesthetic. It moves very fast as you'd expect of a game with such pedigree behind it, but I rarely had that sense of exhilaration I used to feel from the earlier title. This is mainly down to the structure of the city and its roads where I found it all too easy to lose control and go into one of the series' trademark smashes - these still look impressive, but even there I felt like they weren't quite as satisfying as in 'B2,' though I'm quite prepared to accept this could be down to my own familiarity of the old game which I've played on and off for seventeen years, and the same can be said of my propensity to crash in this later version since I'm not as familiar with every twist and turn of track any more.

Where the technical advancements show themselves more fully are in the ability to stream a large selection of various music tracks (including the nostalgically appealing addition of past 'Burnout' music, much appreciated!), off the tiny cartridge (if you can call such a slim slip of plastic by such a clumpy name!), and cycle through them with a button press mid-game (though this function eventually became redundant and I'd have much preferred the ability to sound my horn, one of the fun little details in 'B2,' almost mitigated by the bikes being capable of wheelies!), and more especially (leaving aside the untapped online developments), the day/night system which can follow a 24-minute cycle or longer, even up to a full 24 hour period, or you can simply select what time of day you prefer. I have to admit that while in early play I enjoyed playing around with the music and time of day, eventually I switched off the tunes entirely and halted time almost exclusively to midday as having the best visibility of the road ahead, a crucial component in winning events! That left the addition of bikes to the playing field as the only major new addition that interested me on a practical level: for one thing they can go a lot faster and are more manoeuvrable, but I was also more prone to crashes since you're obviously far more vulnerable on two wheels than four. I loved the bikes, and found myself mainly sticking to them at first for sheer speed and fun, but they are kept separate from the main 'tour' in that you only have the checkpoint races against the clock of the 'Burning Routes' to notch up events to reach your full licence and then you're done (though I came full circle after everything else had been completed to do the Road Rules, both day and night, which gave a nice symmetry to the whole experience).

There's no racing other bikes or mixing and matching different vehicles in races (like in 'MK Wii'), and only after Burning Route completion did I feel forced to get into the game proper and go through all the car events. I'm not complaining about the bikes, I just wish they'd been more integrated into the whole, but even the side objectives of smashing billboards, for example, are removed for bikes, leaving the feeling this is practically a separate game within a game, and then you have to go and do the real 'work' of car driving from the ground up, the ponderousness of the lowest level four-wheeled vehicles early on being a bit of a comedown after the speed and agility of bikes (technically there are a load of extra cars to play with since the bonus material, like Big Surf, is available from the start, but I stuck to the unlockable path as it was meant to be played). It's also odd that, while you see your biker, that's the only person in the game: no pedestrians, no cyclists, and even more noticeably, no drivers - in 'B2,' while you never saw any casualties, you could still see the shadowy form of a human being within all the vehicles! I wouldn't want them to show horrific, real injuries or anything like that, but you do feel a bit like vehicles are merely robots, and while I wouldn't really expect people (unless they had the ability to leap aside - again, I don't want a game where you run people down, or anything of that kind!), that is the sort of development I might have imagined in a much more advanced game engine. But this is all part of the style they're going for, though I did feel the arcade nature wasn't quite as prominent as in 'B2' where you would have huge neon arrows showing you where you could go, and it was more about ramping up to extreme levels of speed.

Due to the stop-start nature of crashes I felt there was less emphasis on dangerous driving, the hallmark of the series, with boost power easier to achieve (you no longer have to always wait until the meter fills to maximum, for example), and the feeling the balance between speed and care wasn't quite strong enough to create the lift-off I needed to get close to the kind of experience I had on 'B2.' Another side of that is the necessity to have half an eye on the map showing the various roads, because it's easy to miss the right turning and have to spin back around because otherwise you'll never catch up. In fact I found it best to pause at the start of a race (and sometimes during it), to check the full map in order to work out the best route to take, another way it became stop-start gaming. Most annoyingly (and I'm aware this may sound petty!), pressing '+' to go into the pause menus doesn't immediately take you to the world map, you then have to tap 'L' a couple of times to get there, which takes a few seconds, and in a game that's all about speed this seemed a bit of a clunky interface to me, nor are there any satnav options to guide you so you can concentrate on the basic twitch gaming of racing. I'll allow it is impressive that opponents go off on different routes, and so can you, and there are shortcuts to take and all that, but having to pay so much attention to the map takes it perhaps too far into realism (again, it could just be my reaction to knowing 'B2' so well).

The control scheme was something else I had to acclimatise to - I'm so used to jamming 'A' to accelerate in every racing game ever, and now I have to hold 'ZR'? I was using the official Pro Controller which was much more comfortable to handle than the tiny Joy-Cons that come attached to the machine, and this being my first Switch game I liked the weightiness of it and the signs of historical Nintendo development, changing the old 'Z-Trigger' from the N64 to two extra shoulder buttons below 'L' and 'R,' to make 'ZL' and 'ZR,' so I was right at home in the terminology (and maybe there is the option to assign buttons differently on the Switch itself - there was certainly no sign of that in-game), but I did find it slightly less comfortable to hold than the classic 'Cube Controller, and the rumble effect seemed much diminished compared with that, too. But 'A' only selecting and 'B' for boosting...? It definitely took some hours for my mind to get used to a very different setup, too often hitting 'Y' which spins you round in a handbrake turn, though I will praise the Pro for it's long battery life which allows you to use it cordless without worrying for quite a while. While I'm talking gaming history in the Controller, I also have to mention the game manual, or in this case, lack of one - this was a new copy of the game so I'm taking it Switch titles don't come with any physical material, and that's a shame as flipping through a manual has always been part of the experience for me and there were aspects of the game I could have done with straightening out, such as the Showtime option which I had to look up online to find out how to access (hit 'L' and 'R' in general play), and while there are optional tips spoken by a slightly irritating DJ throughout, reading material would have been preferable and more in-depth.

'Need For Speed' has been mentioned and I have to say that a big part of not being wowed by 'BPR' as a whole is that I feel I've experienced games very close in approximation thanks to the former series - even those tend to blend together for not developing all that much, but nothing has impressed me as much as 'Most Wanted,' before or since, in crafting a large open world environment and a sense of control and speed. It's been a few years now since I played that so I may be misremembering, perhaps 'BPR' is bigger, but the impression I have is that that was huge and the addition of the police chasing you, exhilarating. In comparison I often found myself going through the motions of completion, ticking off this event or challenge, adding a billboard or a new car to my tally, but after the early thrill of biking, never quite feeling I'd taken off. My thoughts are mixed on whether you should be able to simply select the next race and instantly appear at the starting line or whether the local knowledge gained through travelling is worth all the extra time, but there didn't seem to be that wide a variety of events: you have the standard Race, the Stunt Run where it's all about scoring points and avoiding accidents at all costs once the timer's run down to keep the score going, Marked Man where you have to reach a finish line without being battered into destruction by evil black cars, and Road Rage where you get to do the same to everybody else.

Showtime was quite a fun late addition to the package for me, but even that had the impression it was merely a time consumption as you had to get a score for every road in the game world, rather than something particularly challenging since some roads don't have a score to beat, and those that do are usually beaten on first attempt - I know this is really meant for online competition, as are the times for each road, but it seemed typical of the game's attitude to play that everything was more about ticking a checkbox more than it was about real challenge. Showtime was a fun experience just for the wholly different nature of play, despite its relative ease (though even there before playing I imagined it would be like the Crash mode in 'B2' where you'd have a run up to a particular line of traffic and try to hit it at just the right angle, speed and timing to cause the most chains of damage), and there were plenty of events throughout that took multiple attempts to win, I'm not saying it was all easy, but it was more of a bloated, unfocused experience rather than a finely tuned or crafted difficulty curve for the development of your skills. By its nature of being freeform and tackling objectives in any order, there isn't that sense of progression you get in a more structured environment. It's difficult to be too critical because it is an achievement and has more detail and sense of reality than 'NFS' - I enjoyed the screaming, groaning, roaring engines (perhaps in a few years games like this will be the only place to hear the primal evocation of engines as creepily silent electric cars become the norm on our roads?), the crunching crashes and the honking of traffic, but I can imagine still more additions to make the world more real and engrossing without events being boxes to tick.

My favourite part was undoubtedly the Road Rages since that's the time I felt I had the most freedom to simply smash and charge about in total anarchic chaos with targets speeding around you all over the map - getting on one of those motorways was a great tactic as you repeatedly slam opponents against the barriers with the merest tap and wiggle on their rear, all while they try to do the same to you. This would make an excellent multiplayer game, whether hunting a human player down or just 'passing in the night' as you each attempted to rack up the higher score. Marked Man was fairly fun, but more difficult as the AI was very good at knocking you over. The only other event is the Burning Route where you have to win a time trial with a specific vehicle - collecting all the cars added a fun element, either they're trophies for winning or they're set free somewhere on the map and if you smash them up you get to add them to the collection (slightly annoying they don't come sleek and shiny and have to go through a repair shop, but you are picking them up from a Junkyard, I suppose!). If all this wasn't enough there's that entire other island to do a whole load more events, its own collection of billboards, fences to smash, jumps, cars to win... I certainly wouldn't complain about lack of content, my total times of Paradise City with cars, with bikes and Big Surf came to around eighty hours across two months' playing! I think I would complain that much of it does seem repetitive, because it is, and not just due to this game, but to the various similar titles I've spent many hours on before this. I just don't think a completely open world was necessarily playing to the series' strengths, but I'm glad to have been able to find that out for myself, and while I can't imagine really going back to it to do everything again, perhaps the occasional bike ride on the open roads at sunset will tempt me.

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