Burnout Paradise: Preview

Burnout will be released on PC. No, you are not being played, everything is serious. This year Electronic Arts makes a generous gift to owners of personal computers – the best arcade car racing in the universe. With the most beautiful accidents in history. We played the version for Xbox 360 and are ready to talk in detail about what kind of game awaits us this fall.

But first, a little history. If you follow news from the console world, you probably know that Burnout -the main reason for console owners to turn up their noses at combinations of words Need for Speed and look condescendingly at Bugbear’s research in the series Flatout. The point here is this: Burnout – not really a race. That is, the classic Race mode is, of course, present here, but the emphasis is seriously shifted towards, to put it mildly, violations of traffic rules. Each car is equipped with nitro acceleration, which is earned by ignoring these very rules: driving in the oncoming lane, dangerously overtaking traffic and, of course, accidents.

Accidents – the hallmark of the series – looked great before, but in Burnout Paradise they reached some completely unattainable heights. Cars crumple like accordions, fly into the air, lose windows, doors, wheels, and all this splendor is demonstrated in a spectacular slo-mo, and the camera happily snatches the most advantageous angles. Considering that the average accident here occurs once every five to ten seconds and completely fills the nitro boost gauge, it’s easy to guess the surest way to win the race: knock your opponents off the track, sending them on an unplanned date with the nearest concrete barrier.

The apogee of all this disgrace Anadol24.co.uk is the Road Rage mode, in which there are dozens and hundreds of accidents (in the game they are called Takedowns). Prizes are usually limited to a certain number of "knocks down", and the race can be completed with "gold" or "silver". Or you can continue to educate careless rivals – after all, as you know, there is no limit to perfection.

There are other modes. For example, Marked Man will invite us to take part in survival races, where we need to get to the finish line without getting hit by angry opponents. Burning Route – it would seem like an ordinary circuit race against time, but as a reward you are given new cars, in which you first need to go through the track. And Stunt Run, as you can easily guess from the name, asks the player to combine various tricks as tightly and frequently as possible – from drifting and crashing traffic, to jumping from springboards and knocking down billboards, which Paradise City is so generously dotted with.

Yes, we have come to the most important and serious innovation, which puts Burnout Paradise on a completely new level in the development of the series – the fictional city, Paradise City. You can move around the huge metropolis, which is not inferior in detail even to Liberty City from GTA 4: the menu with a choice of events and the campaign devoid of plot from the previous series went into the trash. Now we have to drive around in search of one hundred and twenty traffic lights scattered across the map – race starting points. Occasionally returning to the garage to change the car of one of three classes – one is better suited for racing, the second is for destroying opponents, and the third is for performing combinations of tricks. Another interesting new product is gas and repair stations. The former replenish nitro acceleration, and the latter deprive the car of visible damage. By the way, the routes are now unlimited – the path to the finish can be laid along the most unexpected side streets, checking the street index and mini-map. That at a speed of 400 kilometers per hour is not so simple.

Multiplayer makes you remember Test Drive Unlimited and NFS: Motor City Online – for the city to be filled with live rivals, you just need to press a button right during the game. It is not entirely clear how this will be implemented on a PC, but, apparently, we cannot do without the crude and unfinished Windows Live service.

Criterion Games, if you don’t know, not only the creators of the racing series Burnout and shooter Black, but also the authors of the popular multi-platform Renderware engine (see. it, for example, in all three-dimensional GTA last generation), so there is no need to worry about graphics and performance: on consoles the game ran without visible loads with 60 frames per second and at the time of its release looked better than all the video game racing on the planet. Porting is carried out personally Criterion, promising support for high resolutions, shameless optimization and the possibility of user modifications – we are expecting, soon after the release, an improved fleet of vehicles, including real car models created by folk craftsmen (in the game, all cars are deprived of brands for the sake of the ability to crush them into flat cakes).

For dessert – the licensed soundtrack, which has always been a hallmark of the series. Names for every taste: Guns’n’Roses, Depeche Mode, Faith No More and even Avril Lavigne. As the game progresses, we are tirelessly accompanied by advice from DJ Atomica, the host of the local radio station Crash FM, who has appeared in many games from Electronic Arts. There is no need to talk about the quality of game sounds – engines roar, tires squeal, iron rattles, deforming. Everything is like your life if it consisted of continuous car accidents.

Many updates have been released and are still being released for Burnout Paradise – in some, the developers add a day and night cycle, in others – new cars, and in others – they threaten to introduce motorcycles. Most likely, all of them will already be included in the PC version, but Criterion continues to develop the game and support for such free patches in the future will be very helpful.

Free gameplay and one huge city, which replaced a strict list of races and tracks in different cities of the world, caused bewilderment among some ardent fans of the series – they say, why change something that has been tested by time. But we still like such interesting changes much more than churning out identical twin games – since Burnout 2, only the graphics have changed significantly in the series. All we have to do is wait until autumn and plunge into the dizzying whirlwind of spectacular accidents and insane speeds. For the first time in the history of the series – on personal computers.