I've played all the Burnouts before and I really loved them because it was just a series of easy to navigate menus and if you just wanted to race you could do that straight away with your friends. However with burnout Paradise they've added this over complex open world where as a new player who just wants to race with his friends has to learn everything about the game first and is lost. I just want a linear track like the old Burnout games where I can easily race my friends instead of feeling like I have to fight the messy over complex menus.
When I first started up Burnout I was greeted with the annoying splash screens I'm really hating so much and then having to sign up to the online. Then once I got into the game theres basic menu's and I don't understand why there arn't options like controls and Audio and Video in the main menu.... I have to enter the game to get to them. Even the config which is out of the game is useless and it really pisses me off when they force you to enter the game to change them all, like GTA 4 did which just screams bad rushed port to me.
Once I'm in the game I get this annoying woman talking to me followed up by this annoying guy and I just want to shut them up and race. Yet I finally get playing and it is like so how do I race? How do I even start? Well the default controls are really poor and messy. Instead of going for a standard keyboard driving setup like any normal game they've decided to dot them all randomly over the keyboard to make it harder for you to know what does what. I finally get to know what does what when I finally worked out how to navigate the menu. It is such a bad and slow menu for PC people where instead of it being easy and using your mouse, you have to use F1 and F2 to scroll menus....... wtf? Theres so much shit floating about on the menus that I feel lost and it is over complex and just messy that I just hate it and want to rip my eyes out.
Why do I have to drive up to traffic lights to race all the time and ride around the city doing different events. Why is it like an RPG racer where I have to progress to get better cars and go to my home to switch vehicles? I just wanted to login with my mates and race on tracks like the old Burnout games. Atleats give me the option to do all that and don't make me ride round this stupid city. Theres another thing I hate that the races are all pick your own route around the city and the city feels really dead because theres far less traffic than old Burnout games and the races always feel like you're racing against yourself rather than other cars. i just don't see why they went for this lonely feeling open world gameplay that just makes me wish it was GTA where I could go and steal other people's cars.
Another thing I hate is why do the cars feel stuck to the ground and when you go over a bump and then land it goes all jerky like I'm being pulled in by a magnet or something. There doesn't seem to be any driving physics in the game like GTA games where it feels so natural and your cars react much more like real life. When I was on the bike I could hit walls and still didn't come off and they bikes controlled more like cars and I could pull off impossible wheelies and do impossible sharp corners which just looked dumb. Where is the rider when you crash? I want to see him go flying because that would be funny, instead the Bike crashes are poor and they don't even break apart.
The sound in Burnout is ok but there seems to be a real like of ambient sound, like the city being alive. Also you have this stupid radio host or whatever who keeps giving you tips and talking and he just becomes very annoying with his generic Dude accent. The Music all just seems like Generic rock and that is boring because I've heard it all 1000 times before in other games. You know them generic extreme sports soundtracks you always seem to get. Probably the only thing I really loved about the sound of the game was the Bikes when you turned them on.
The graphics seemed really poor to me because while the vehicles all looked like current gen, I found the city to look very DX7 or PS2 like. I have the game settings all maxed out (which there isn't many options anyways) and it just looks very lackluster. Theres hardly any vehicles about and the textures are all pretty poor and theres no HDR or good use of DX9/10. It just proves to me that they badly ported this to the PC and didn't give us higher resolution textures and HDR. Another thing that pissed me off was no Windowed mode and no widescreen option in the config before you start the game so really picking your resolution there and choosing a widescreen one isn't good. I can't help but feel the game would have looked alot better if they had had linear tracks instead of an ugly open world.
Burnout only gets a 2 from me because I didn't like it at all but it doesn't deserve a 1, not a complete disaster. I just hope they go back to the old format instead of this stupid open world design that just doesn't work.
