Burnout Paradise Remastered

Genre: Open-World Arcade Racing

Players: 1-8 Competitive (Local Alternating), 2-8 Competitive (Online)

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Review:

Generally, when I do a Re-Review, it is either because something about the game has changed, or because my feelings about the game have evolved and changed so dramatically that I feel it warrants a second look. Burnout Paradise Remastered is a different story, though. The game remains virtually the same as it was during launch, and my feelings about the game itself have not changed since I first reviewed it.

However, one major factor contributing to my overall opinion of the game has changed so dramatically that I felt it warranted me revisiting the review and altering the game’s review grade. This one major issue with the game soured what was otherwise a delightful experience, and made this a game I found difficult to recommend even to players I’d feel confident would enjoy the game. In the time since, this is an issue that has become far less problematic – the price.

When Burnout Paradise Remastered launched on the Nintendo Switch, it launched with a price tag of $50, despite that the original game was released all the way back in 2008, despite that the remaster had been out on other platforms since 2018, and despite that the remaster currently sold on those other platforms for a mere $20. While I give some leeway to Nintendo Switch titles being priced higher due to the additional costs of the cartridge format, this was absolutely unacceptable, and I made my thoughts on this clear in my first review of the game.

However, in early 2021, without any fanfare, the game’s price dropped to $30 on the Nintendo Switch. Suddenly, what was previously a great game being dangled in front of Nintendo Switch players to try to horrifically price-gouge them had now become a great game with a modest markup that could be excused as a part of the cost of releasing the game on Nintendo’s hardware. And with that, my one biggest objection to recommending this game… vanished.

With this being the case, what follows will largely be the exact same review I wrote before. After all, the game itself hasn’t changed, and I stand by my earlier thoughts. However, my biggest complaints about the game no longer being the absurd price, and my main negative points are now more minor issues, and as a result the review grade has been updated to reflect this. I have also changed the structure of the review just a bit to reflect how I’ve been doing things lately. So, here goes…

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Coming Back to Paradise

Burnout Paradise Remastered is an Open-World Arcade Racing game originally released on multiple platforms in 2008, and then remastered and re-released with all previous DLC on multiple platforms in 2018, with this version of the game finally coming to a Nintendo platform for the first time in 2020. This is the fifth game in the main series of Burnout games and seventh overall, and it completely changed the formula of the high-speed, crash-focused racing series by bringing the series into an open world.

When it comes to this sort of port of both an open-world game and a super-fast racing game, the biggest question will of course be how well the game fares on a technical level, and in that area, Burnout Paradise Remastered looks pretty darn good on the Nintendo Switch, all things considered. This version of the game retains a good amount of the improvements made for the Remastered version of the game made for more powerful modern-day hardware, such as improved shadows and particle effects, but runs at a lower resolution than those versions (900p in docked mode, 720p in handheld mode), and while this is still mostly pretty good, it does cause a massive amount of aliasing that I found to be pretty distracting when I first started the game, though I soon got used to it.

However, the game does manage to run at a rock-solid 60FPS, dropping to under 55FPS in only some of the busiest areas of the game (thanks to Digital Foundry for the numbers), and the combination of the excellent framerates and the super-fast speeds the game is capable of delivering make for a truly superb experience when things really get going. It is absolutely thrilling being able to speed from one end of the massive map to the other at blazingly high speeds without interruption. You can find occasional pop-in here if you’re looking for it, but it’s not super-noticeable.

On the downside of things, this is a game that was designed for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generation of consoles, and it does feel its age – there doesn’t feel as much detail or graphical splendor as we’ve come to see in more modern racing games. Also, the game does still take time loading up new cars in its junkyard loading area, and while traveling around its map won’t cause any load times, starting up a new mission does break up the action by loading up an introduction just in case you’ve forgotten how a Road Rage mission works for the fifteenth time.

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A Dream Machine or a Lemon?

Still, this is a game that was heavily-lauded when it was first released, so the question then becomes… how well does it hold up, gameplay-wise? And the answer is, mostly pretty well… but. I’ll get to the “but” in a moment. The good news is that racing in this game is still as fantastic as ever, with some really great fast-paced and intense racing in a location that has a good amount of personality and variety to it, and being able to choose your route gives some good potential to not just out-race your opponent, but out-plan your opponent by choosing a better route. The game does a lot to encourage this by absolutely littering the map with countless shortcuts, as well as hidden unlockables, including multiple secret areas designed with the sandbox nature of this game in mind, making this a great playground for stunts and silliness.

Okay, now for the “but”. I always felt, and still do, that the open-world nature of this game, while bringing something new and interesting to the series, also brought the series farther away from some of its core strengths. The Crash Mode, arguably the highlight of the series prior to Burnout Paradise, was replaced in this game with something called Showtime Mode, which allows players to essentially take any point in the game and turn it into a carnage-filled crash-fest. In theory this is fantastic and really opens up the game, but in practice this absolutely loses the meticulously-designed nature of the Crash Mode that almost made it like an elegant explosion-filled ballet of a puzzle. Now, players can repeatedly hammer on the boost button to toss their car around like a piece of popcorn, more likely to land on cars rather than smash into them, and the “setting off a chain of dominoes” delight of the Crash Mode is now down to how much destruction you can directly cause, which is still fun, but completely lacks the wonderful nuance that mode had.

The other element that I feel the open-world nature of the game detracts from is multiplayer. For starters, there is no local multiplayer, aside from an alternating hotseat mode that’s sorely lacking in features and oddly segmented off from the rest of the game. Players can play with up to eight players online, but because of the open world this mode sorely lacks structure that a room host is apparently expected to provide, which on the Nintendo Switch seems to be like herding cats.

In my first online game, I found the location I was in was nowhere near the other players, and by the time I worked my way over to them I had missed out on multiple goals the host had cycled through. In another game, the host decided to repeatedly keep bringing players back to the baseball stadium in the corner of the map, where most of the players ended up just killing time as one or more of the players were always out messing around while everyone else waited for them. At the very least I can say that online play ran smoothly and didn’t seem to suffer from lag or anything like that, although at multiple points I found myself getting dropped from a room inexplicably. In the end, I would say that unlike most racing games, I wouldn’t call multiplayer one of this game’s highlights.

One other thing I should mention here, and I don’t seem to have a better place to put it in – this game does support touchscreen navigation on its map screen (though on a separate note, I wish there were more map display options in the game overall, especially given how important the map is). There is no support for motion controls, though, and in fact no ability to remap the controls or even view them in the game’s menus, and some stuff like how to start the game’s Showtime Mode actually required me to look it up online.

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~Slaps Hood~ “This Bad Boy Can Fit So Many Reviews In It”

Well, here in my original review is where I complained a lot about the price… and I’m not going to do that here. While $30 isn’t a fantastic price for Burnout Paradise Remastered on the Nintendo Switch (it is still cheaper on other modern consoles), it’s not a horrible one, either. And the game goes on sale often enough that you can cut the difference even further if you watch prices.

However, in the end, Burnout Paradise Remastered is still a phenomenal racing game, and it is well worth the $30 price tag, Nintendo Tax and all. It may be a recycled game from the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 era, it may be lacking the series’ signature Crash Mode, it may be releasing on a platform that lacks analog triggers and a lot of modern online features… but at the end of the day, it’s a phenomenal racing game, and quite frankly one of the best racing games on the Nintendo Switch. And now that Electronic Arts is charging a more reasonable price for it, I can say yes, if you enjoy racing games, you should absolutely get this game on your Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Burnout Paradise Remastered is a solid port to the Nintendo Switch of an excellent Open-World Arcade-style Racing Game, though the game does show its age somewhat, and the open-world elements detract from some elements of the series like the crash mode and multiplayer. At its new price point of $30, it’s still more expensive than other versions of the game, but this price tag is far more palatable, and Burnout Paradise is such a fantastic racing game that Nintendo Switch racing fans should consider it a must-have.

Grade: A-

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