Been hooked on the Switch version of Burnout Paradise since it arrived in the mail, making this game portable led to a dangerously compelling game. Just cleared all events in the main game and Big Surf Island.
The port of course suffers from the same issues as it did in 2008 - namely the single player takes much too long to become challenging, the difficulty only slowly increasing with repeat attempts of the same mission types and some burning routes.
-But- that aside it’s largely still the gold standard for taking the racing genre open world, as far as I’m concerned. While its contemporaries often barricade up parts of the course or force you to follow set checkpoints, Burnout Paradise created a small number of ‘goal’ locations on the map that races finish by, and leave it up to you to take the fastest route. This makes for some immensely satisfying racing as you use your knowledge of the city to take the best route, or even challenge yourself to take an absurd route to meet and beat the competition to the goal by a slither of a second. Such moments aren’t as rare as you’d think, and they make for a change from the usual rubber-band AI tail-gating you.
I’d never taken the time to check out Big Surf Island before (I think it wasn’t ported to the PC version that I previously owned), but it impressed me as well, with developer Criterion taking a ‘less is more’ approach with a densely packed small location filled with stunt opportunities. It only has 15 events, but they rectify the difficulty problem I mentioned earlier, since they all feel like they are set to the highest difficulty tier, and they all encourage you to make the most of the island’s terrain. Really good stuff.
The Switch port is near-flawless too. Considering a game like this and its predecessors really can’t come out of EA again, I’m hoping they just port the classic Burnout titles as well, particularly 1 and 2. But for now I see this as another ‘forever’ game I’ll keep coming back to. It’s both easy and difficult to believe the game is twelve years old now.