I rented Burnout Paradise a few weeks back. Under normal circumstances I wouldn't have bothered renting it, I would have just bought it. However, I knew that major changes had been made to the game. The kind of changes that I would probably not like. The short review is: I was right.
What I have like best about the Burnout series of games is that Marydalene and I could play together. She gets motion sick while playing many video games, but racing games seem to be okay, so this is one of the few games that we can play together.
Burnout also is more of an arcade style rather than a simulation. Basically that means it is easier to drive at high speeds. That feels more like playing to me, and when I sit down with a video game I want to play.
Either the developer or the publisher decided that they needed to make a change for change's sake. Ruined the game while they were at it. The game was changed to an "open-world." This means that basically a city was created and you can go anywhere in the city that you want to. When you want to take part in a race you drive to the starting point and indicate that you want to start the race. You then have to get to the designated end point any way you see fit. This is great if you want to take the time to memorize the city. I never figured out San Antonio, I sure don't want to memorize the roads in a made up city. There are indicators of which general direction you need to go and the turns for the most direct route are also indicated, but when you are going as fast as you can and have to pay attention so that you don't crash, it's easy to miss the indications. So, racing is messed up.
Another big draw for Burnout was the crash mode. Basically these were separate events where the goal was to create the biggest crash possible measured in dollar value of damages to all vehicles involved. There were several different implementations and many of them were great for playing with a group of people. Crash mode has been eliminated from Paradise and replaced with a janky system that involves turning a crash during a race into a crash event. So, crash mode is wrecked.
The worst change was the elimination of local multiplayer. Yeah, gone completely. My favorite part of Burnout, as stated earlier, was playing with Marydalene. Now I can't. Now I have no desire to purchase the game. So, local multiplayer is just gone.
The Burnout developer took what I considered to be the best parts of the game and either got rid of them or completely messed them up. If you're a video game player I won't tell you whether or not to play Burnout Paradise, but after one rental, I'm done.
Enjoyed the San Antonio comment - I never did understand how you and several other of our children had been to places hundreds of times but got behind a wheel and were seemingly clueless on how to get there.
ReplyDeleteThankfully you all learned what was necessary and we seldom had to rescue a lost driver.