So Burnout Paradise won out. And it’s good.

How good remains to be seen. I spent about two hours with the game last night, trying all but two of the event types (the car-specific races and multiplayer) and winning enough times to kick my license rating up a few notches and unlock a handful of cars. The one or two events I lost show that the reviewers were right: the lack of a Retry option is less of a deal breaker and more of a lingering regret, and as I adapt to Paradise’s structure I imagine there will come a time where I don’t miss it at all. I still don’t agree with the decision to leave it out entirely – making a game more accessible never hurt anybody, and dropping an option that made the game more welcoming to new players by allowing them to play how they want because it dilutes your precious vision of how they should be playing smacks of a pretension level that has no business in games. Still, there really is enough going on to where, if you can put aside the need to master an event before moving on, there’s always something else to do.

“Adapt” is the key word above – Paradise’s utter lack of structure demands an entirely new way of thinking about racing games. Up till now, all my experience with the genre has come via rigid tournament ladders or single races picked from a menu, a format that, while forcing pauses on you while the next event is selected and scores tallied, gives the player a clear understanding of exactly how far they’ve come and how much more there is to do. Other than the different classes of licenses and the number of cars in your junkyard, Paradise has no such structure – events are scattered all over town, and which ones you participate in are completely up to you. Markers show which races you’ve already completed, but even these disappear once you win enough times to move up a license class, giving you the opportunity to continue ranking up however you like. I don’t know how many of each event type there are, but it would surprise me if you could win the game by focusing on Takedown races alone. And that’s pretty great – as the Edge Preview linked to yesterday said, Paradise takes special care to let you choose which version of Burnout you want to play, and how you want to play it.

Paradise City itself is fantastically realized – while it will probably be a while before I instinctively know the shortest path between the start of a race and whichever of the game’s eight finish lines its ending at, the terrain is dotted with enough shortcuts, ramps, mountain passes, and other surprises that many races can be won just by keeping an eye out. The last race I took part in before going to sleep last night was where the design of the city really clicked for me. The finish line was on the other side of town from the start point, taking us across the river and up into the mountains. Along the way I became separated from the rest of the pack – they took a right when I took a left – and we ended up racing up opposite sides of the mountain. A fenced-off dirt road spotted at the last minute gave way to a shortcut, spitting me out just feet away from the finish line and quite literally on top of the frontrunner. I still have no idea how I won. At best guess, I must have bounced off the front of his car and been tossed across the line like a three-ton steel rag doll.

Through moments like this and a dozen others, the game continues to show its potential. Paradise City is a beautiful world, but it’s only a means to an end – at every intersection, every crowded highway or conveniently placed stairwell, its true purpose crackles underneath the pavement. It’s a sandbox unlike any other, the happy hunting grounds of so many Matchbox cars rendered unusable by years of mud, rust, and bent axels from being ramped off the roof. Whether its racing, becoming a target on wheels in a Marked Man event, or just turning your car into a katamari of vehicular destruction via the Showdown mode, there’s always something waiting to be done, some new way of cutting your own path through the game. If you can overcome the completist urge built in by dozens of past racers and come to grips with Criterion’s new vision of what a racing game can be, it just might be paradise.

Filed under: Burnout Paradise, talk about games