The Triangle

Issue date: 1/18/08 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: kotaku.com A small sample of the carnage to be expected from the fifth installment of Burnout Paradise.

Finally, Criterion has released the fifth installment to the Burnout series and the virtual gates to Paradise City have been opened. The Burnout series of racing titles have been the long running leader of arcade style console racers. The games primarily functioned in a linear single race style featuring only closed circuits to run in, but what truly set previous Burnout titles apart from other racers was the sheer sense of speed and destruction. Thankfully, all of the over-the-top insanity provoking speed and carnage has returned and does it ever feel good.

Burnout Paradise has been in development for quite some time now and unlike the previous installments, where the player(s) raced about in pre-determined circuits, Paradise tries reinvent the series in the same way that Test Drive Unlimited did for the Test Drive series. Technically, Paradise can be regarded as a massive multiplayer racing title. The game takes place in Paradise City, which acts as a simply immense playground for fun reckless driving antics. The environment is so large in fact, that it may take a few hours for the average player to become familiar with even a small amount of specific shortcut locations and alternate routes.

The size of the map, however, serves as a major downer with the absence of the ability to restart a race on the fly. Races themselves can be started at nearly any junction and can last anywhere from a minute to eight or 10 and that inability to restart a failed race forces the player to back travel all the way to the specific junction where they had originally began. While it isn't exactly the worst of issues, it does tend to get in the way of the would-be perpetual carnage.

A feature absent this time around is "crash mode," which had placed a player in a preset environment and challenged them to cause as much physical damage to the surrounding traffic as possible. What Paradise is doing to replace or improve upon that feature is called Showtime; Showtime follows the same premise as crash mode, still having the player cause as much damage as possible, but the player can now engage is this activity on the fly, at any given moment, creating accidents that made last up to 30 minutes in length.

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