Burnout Paradise Remastered

Genre: Open-World Arcade Racing

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

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Review:

(Note: This is an outdated review. You can find the updated review here.)

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.

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.

Okay, one final thing before I wrap this up, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. This game is horrendously overpriced. It’s over a decade old, came out two years ago on other platforms, and currently sells on those platforms for $20… yet on the Nintendo Switch, it’s $50. That is some crazy price-gouging going on, and if the game wasn’t pretty darn good and if the Nintendo Switch wasn’t so clearly hurting for good racing games, that price would never fly.

All told, I feel like anything I say about Burnout Paradise on the Nintendo Switch has to come out as muted enthusiasm. It’s a solid port that runs great on the Nintendo Switch… but it still overall feels very much like a previous-generation game. The racing here is fun and fast-paced, and the open-world elements bring some interesting new potential to the gameplay… while at the same time really hurting both the series’ signature Crash Mode as well as its multiplayer. But even so, overall this is still an excellent, fun game well worth having on the Nintendo Switch… so it’s all the more of a shame that it was released with such a ridiculous, unreasonable price. If you’re a fan of Racing games who can find a good deal on this game, know that it’s well worth buying even over a decade after its original release. But, at its current price, it’s hard to recommend it full-heartedly.

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. However, the biggest thing holding this game back is its price tag – at $50, it’s two and a half times the price of the game on other platforms, and while it’s still a fantastic racing game, it’s hard to recommend at that price.

Grade: B

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