Burnout Paradise: Bikes
I’ve written about Burnout Paradise before - hell so has everyone else. Its being a fun game that manages to combine both a great online component and a massive (if slightly repetitive) single player “story” - quite a few games are geared to one or the other, where Burnout balances the two equally. It also comes loaded with awards (from the simple “Drive Around a Bit” to the fiendishly difficult 40x Stunt Run Multiplier) and 72 unlockable cars, paint jobs, timed road rules - I completed the game after nearly 90hrs of gameplay. Venturing online provides further challanges and obviously the ability to race against other drivers to improve your world ranking (I’m 778 out of over 25,000) - the game is massive.
Or it was.
Its even bigger now - the third free game changing update dropped yesterday introducing bikes. The first update mostly addressed bugs and minor issues. There were over 100 “fixes” mainly aimed at tweaking the gameplay and online experience. Thats not to suggest the original version was in anyway flawed - this was about polishing an already excellent game. The second update was all about changing the game - new cars and online challanges were the focus, including new timed online challanges in addition to untimed challanges. Marked Man and Stunt Run (two of the offline race types) were also shoehorned into the online game making it even broader in scope.
The third update includes a weather system, day/night (night time sees less cars on the road), new online challanges and new awards. The awards of course apply only to the new motorcycles. In fact the bikes pack is like an expansion pack proper - a new single player extension, extended online play - Its the sort of thing a Tom Clancy game (R6V2) would add and call Burnout Paradise 2, whilst charging you £45. And its all free.
I did have a bit of trouble trying to install the new update - for some reason (no idea why) everytime the game went into the update cycle, the PS3 reset itself. I deleted the existing game update for Burnout Paradise (Game -> Game Data ->) restarted the game and the update started downloading first time. Not sure what was going on there, I was also downloading the Fifa’09 demo and my hard drive could have been low on space before deleting the existing update. Either way, a message would have been helpful rather than the unit just resetting itself. This is a problem with the PS3 though, and I suspect its an uncommon one, because I googled it and couldn’t find any mention anywhere else.
Gameplay with the bikes is exactly as you’d expect it to be - no drift on two wheels, but tighter turning circles at speed balance each other out, whilst first person view leans convincingly and the acceleration speed are enthralling. The bikes are also less forgiving (scraping the walls for anything more than two seconds means major carnage) and whilst its dissapointing to see a lack of boost, popping wheelies is kinda cool and to be honest going any faster on the bikes would make it impossible to corner, especially given the lack of drift.
I’m still astounded by the care and attention to detail and even the sheer effort going into this game - of course the cynic will argue that making these updates and making them free will convince any doubters to go and pick up a copy - and sure it probably will. But its lazy to suggest these updates are purely for the “haven’t got the game yet give me something more” market - Criterion surely wouldn’t have fixed all the minor issues they have done and would have concentrated on purely new features rather than tweaking the existing mechanics of the game if that were the case. They’ve also paid particular attention to their forums and listened to feedback from existing game owners on both platforms.
Gaming needs more developers who actually care about the games they produce, rather than developers who produce a half baked film cash-in or sequel before moving onto the next franchise. With at least 2 further updates planned for Burnout in addition to an interim patch to bring trophies to the PS3 version of the game, there’s still plenty of mileage left in Paradise.