Well, as most of you should know, Thursday (that’s 3 days ago) brought the release of the Burnout Paradise demo all over the world on PSN. If you’ve played it, you won’t be able to say that it isn’t amazing.

Since it’s a demo, it’s obviously not going to be as impressive as the full game - for example, in the demo, you can only burn, crash and stunt around a small portion of the City that will be present in the full game (which will be released in January). Also, you can only drive one car, the Hunter Cavalry. On the other hand, despite this being a demo, you can test the Camera functionality of the game (your photo on your drivers license, and a mugshot popping up when you take someone down online if they have a camera), you can play online, which is very impressive, and you can drive around as much as your heart desires.

Now, the graphics are great. The cars especially look fanastic in HD, with the reflections from the surroundings on the cars, and whenever you crash, the car crumples brilliantly, keeping the crashing as much fun as the winning as with the previous Burnout games.  In particular, if you drive headlong into a wall, sometimes you can be treated to a view from above in slow motion as the car slams into the wall, so you can see the car crumple in all of it’s realistic crushing glory. The camera during a crash always picks the best angles to make you wince and go ‘woah’ at the same time. Obviously, the graphics of the rest of the world are good too, the glare on the roads from the everpresent sun looks particularly good, but other than that, the graphics didn’t make me go ‘wow’ like I wanted them to.

Now, the gameplay. It’s fast. Very, very fast - ball-crunchingly fast, in fact. You get that sense of outstanding speed when you’re boosting, even in the simple car the demo gives you, so in the full game, you just know that you’ll be moving so fast in some of those cars that you just won’t be able to see properly. Controlling the car is as easy as ever - with the R2 trigger being accelerate, and L2 being brake/reverse, they work well. X boosts, which uses the usual firey-explodey sound (yeah, I just made that term up) whilst you’re boosting. Square is a kind of handbreak, which is very very useful if you find yourself a few meters away from a rather solid looking wall. The free roaming aspect is interesting. On one hand, you’ll have 30 kilometers of city to speed your way around (and into), on the other hand, you can tell that it’ll suffer the usual problem with free roaming games - it’ll get boring. It’s inevitable, eventually, Burnout Paradise will get boring because of it’s free roaming, but I can tell that it’ll be bloody amazing whilst it lasts. The demo, unfortuantely, give you very little races to do, (I’ve found 1 race and 1 stunt run), so you can’t really sample that much of the actual racing.

Online is genius. To go online, you press right on the d-pad, go to friends and either select a friend and you’ll send an invitation to them, they accept and then you’re online together - there are no loading times at all, it’s just that simple. Or you can select quick Freeburn, and it’ll do the same but with anyone at random who happens to be playing the game online. There are no loading times to get online at all, and it makes the whole thing simple and streamlined, but satisfyingly so. Whilst you’re playing online, you can set records for a few things (longest jump, longest drift, most barrel rolls, longest oncoming, etc) and other players can try to beat them, or you can start a challenge for all the players, like breaking through 6 billboards, or drifting 400 yards and getting 40 near misses all together. Or you can simple chase each other and take each other down.

Well, all in all, the Burnout Paradise demo is great. I could play this for hours (and have been), so I really can’t wait for the full game. I can already tell it’s going to be a must-have, so now I’ve waiting for it. With baited breath.

Filed under: B, Game Previews, Playstation Store