This weekend, Burnout Paradise is going to be 15 years old. The last entry within the Burnout franchise before developer Criterion was shuffled off and away to focus on Need For Speed, Burnout Paradise remains among the best racing games of all time – and my personal favourite – and it's not really the best game within the Burnout series.
But what was it about Burnout Paradise that made the franchise so beloved? It starts strong with the introduction, the opening bars of Guns N Roses classic 'Paradise City' playing every time you start the game on the panning shot of the titular city, cars smashing into one another all the while.
From there though, I believe it is the energy. There's something quite loose and arcadey about Burnout Paradise that racers have struggled to complement since: you don't have to be a master at racing games, or even think much about cars, to achieve success in Burnout Paradise. Powerslides, airborne 180s as well as the sporadic mid-race barrel roll are all increasingly simple to drag out with just a few button presses, there is however additionally a number of different events. Racing isn't the best way to be successful in Paradise, with players free to progress in a number of different events, including marked man (huge AI cars hunt you as you drive over the city), Road Rage (take out cars) and stunt runs (do stunts).
It keeps these sensibilities in other parts of progression too: to unlock a brand new car you just need to spot it driving around while you're free exploring the city and remove it, wrecking it and adding it for your collection, available to switch into from your next visit in the scrapyard.
There's a genuine sense of fun no matter what to the game, something that bleeds into Paradise's online offering too. The multiplayer encouraged the type of free-roam dicking around that personified the very best of the Xbox Live era, also it regularly became a part of my Xbox 360 console rotation, friends rolling between titles like Rainbow Six Vegas, Halo 3, Red Dead Redemption and Burnout Paradise chasing thrills with no real aim in mind.
Seeing ‘Removed!’ splattered across your screen after your friend in a beefed-up transit van has trashed your vehicle and left you, having a giggle, within the dust encourages the type of low-grade jokes and friendly competition that can make a multiplayer game something. Paradise leans into it perfectly, giving you a series of multiplayer challenges to tackle either competitively or cooperatively. Until you have had four university friends desperately trying to parallel park with handbrake turns or sniggering privately as they try to escape over the city with everybody else in hot pursuit inside a Paradise-sanctioned game of high-speed Tag, you haven't seen the sort of fun you might have with multiplayer.
It took benefit of the Xbox Camera, something which really was only employed for people trying to play Uno on Xbox Live, and allow you to have a photo for the in-game driving license, but would also let you snap a photo of yourself to show to someone you'd taken down. The two-second timer before a photo was taken was – and I unfortunately speak from experience, however it was 15 years ago – almost exactly enough time to stand up and turn around to moon someone, showing your underwear-clad butt to the friend you'd just rammed at high-speed.
This is all capped served by the game's soundtrack, which in my money is the very best racing soundtrack out there. Pulling an even handbrake turn through traffic as the opening bars of Killswitch Engage's 'My Curse' feels phenomenal, while scrambling through the city to N.E.R.D's ‘Rockstar’ is a memory I'll probably never shake. I came across LCD Soundsystem playing Burnout Paradise, a band I've paid attention to regularly ever since.
Unfortunately, the free-roam city does result in one of the game's biggest issues: so plentiful are the shortcuts and alternate routes it often feels less like you're racing and more like orienteering. It's not hard to hang a left into what appears like a shortcut and find themselves in a dead end without any chance to regain your now-fading lead. In making a large city and dropping players in it, we lost the tight well-tailored tracks from the earlier Burnout games in return for freedom.
However, this would be a simple fix for the next Burnout game, adding railings or perhaps a GPS in the same way that Forza Horizon, a game title that captures Paradise's sense of freedom but not its fun, already does. Sadly, no Burnout sequel appears to be within the works and the franchise lay dormant.
Thankfully, EA recognised what it really had with Paradise at the time. Expansions added motorbikes, toy cars, several licensed offerings, a day and night cycle and even a whole new island to understand more about, each coming having a collection of extra events and challenges. Sadly, since that time the only real crack of light has been a modern-day remaster released in 2023.
So, let's pour out one big glass of petrol during the last from the great arcade racers and hope that maybe, just maybe, EA might think fit to place Criterion back where it belongs: creating a pulse-pounding racer that's less about the cars and much more about enjoying an amazing feeling of speed.
Burnout Paradise Remastered is available on PC, Xbox and PlayStation.
