Burnout Paradise Remastered Review: Still The Best Around

★★★★☆ (4/5)

After a ten-year hiatus, Burnout is back. Sadly, it's only a remaster of the last game in the franchise, but fortunately Burnout Paradise still holds up as one of the most bombastic and enjoyable racers of all time. Taking the series open world for the first and only time, the ambitious title - despite introducing a wealth of new features and mechanics - never received a sequel, and this impressive remaster is a reminder of just how tragic that was.

Although it changes things up by making each racetrack part of one big hub world, the fundamentals that made Burnout so gratifying in the first place are all intact - and arguably better than ever. The sense of speed is impressive even by today's standards, and from the opening clunkers you're lumped with to the ridiculously fast supercars you're in control of by the end, everything flows with a sense of urgency and fluidity that makes barrelling down the highway, with one near-miss after the other blowing past you, acting as a testament to the timelessness of the franchise's core gameplay.

While that gameplay loop does sustain the tens of hours you can put into title though, Paradise's new open-world routes very much feel like a foundation for a more confident and refined sequel that never came. The environment is of course great to drive through, but the difficult-to-follow tracks can make it easy for wrong turns to happen, especially when you take into account the speed of the actual gameplay.

When you get better you can recover when you mess up, and it does reward getting to know the sandbox in the long run, but it can be frustrating to botch a race at the last turn and have to drive back to the starting point to retry. It doesn't kill the experience, but little additions like an accessible retry button would have been a welcome inclusion to refine this small gripe.

However, the lack of defined levels can lead to more variety when it comes to the main activities, because while there are preferred routes from point to point, they aren't initially revealed to you, making experimentation the key to success.

The open world comes alive outside of these authored activities though. Although the sandbox isn't that large, and it doesn't take that long to get around at top speeds, it's so densely detailed with stuff to see and things to do that you're constantly finding new gameplay opportunities. Likewise, there's always some sort of positive reinforcement going on - be it smashing through shortcut barriers, taking on stunt jumps or taking down special cars - with everything being counted and contributing to your overall driving career. Although following the "campaign" is satisfying as you unlock more cars and activities, beaming down streets at ridiculous speeds trying to find the last shortcuts in an area - if for no reason other than to rack up your overall percentage, rather than for any future tactical advantage - feels amazing.

To some, this may come across as "busywork", and that's not entirely an unfair assessment, but unlike modern open world games these smaller activities are the game. There's no real campaign or story to speak of, but that's not a bad thing; the developers distill the Burnout experience down to this smorsgaboard of activities, and whether you're searching for collectibles or taking part in a race that could clinch you a better car, everything feels like time well spent.

As EA's first foray into the world of remasters (please let this pave way for a remastered Mass Effect trilogy. Please.) Paradise has offered a pretty neat update of a classic game, but it's not the complete overhaul it could have been. The upgraded graphics that support up to 4k resolutions, as well as a buttery-smooth frame-rate of 60FPS are welcome, but it's not the most beautiful game around, especially when things are at a standstill. Fortunately, it's rare when things aren't going by in a blur, and the new visuals do a great job of catching those slow-mo 200mph crashes that turn the flashiest cars into nothing but scrap metal.

Likewise, the handling of the cars themselves doesn't quite hold up all these years later, and jumping back a decade and getting behind the wheel of either these supercars or bikes makes you appreciate just how refined the gameplay is in modern racers, arcade or otherwise. It's a serviceable job as a remaster, but it would have been appreciated if EA took a page out of Blupoint's book and streamlined and tinkered with some under-the-hood problems that needlessly date the experience.

Ultimately, Burnout Paradise Remastered is just as satisfying now as it was back in 2007, hampered only slightly by the expectations some modern gamers may bring to the title as well as some problems from the original launch that could have seemingly been polished in time for this re-release. It benefits from some visual updates as well as a frame-rate that better accommodates the intense action, and overall acts as a shining example of why anarchic arcade racers like it deserve another lap around the track.