It’s fair to say that Burnout Paradise was, on its original release, simultaneously very well received and rather controversial.

Few would deny that it is a quality game, and one packed with things to do both offline and online, but for some it also represented an early example of how open worlds were starting to make unwanted intrusions into all manner of different games.

That was in 2008. Ten years later, in 2018, Burnout Paradise Remastered was released on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. And six years after that, I picked up a Switch copy for a tenner. Seems like a prime opportunity to see how well this game has stood the test of time, non? Read on, and let’s see.

I enjoyed Burnout Paradise on its original release. I played it on Xbox 360 and had an Xbox Vision Camera, so was able to take full advantage of the hilarious photograph feature, whereby if you wrecked someone in multiplayer, you got to see their reaction. This, of course, led to people doing all manner of silly (and often inappropriate) things.

But for me, the main attraction, as with most games, was the single player mode. Paradise City was a fun map to explore, and the various event types made good use of it without overcomplicating things. Plus the various hidden “Smash” and “Billboard” collectibles helped make exploration feel rewarding without the game littering its map display with icons.

I was a big fan of the earlier Burnout games — particularly Burnout 2, which I maintain is still the best one — and I recognised that Burnout Paradise was offering something significantly different to what had come before. I initially had mixed feelings about this, as I felt that the earlier Burnout games’ strong sense of structure had worked very well — but at the same time, I was also conscious that Burnout Paradise’s existence didn’t cancel out those earlier games, and thus it made sense for the game to do something a little different.

Open-world racing games had started to become fashionable with the advent of the HD consoles, and honestly that had always been a bit of a dream come true for me. Back when I was playing Test Drive II: The Duel on Atari ST, I absolutely longed for a game where you weren’t just confined to a single road; I wanted a game where you could turn off at a junction and go a different way. I didn’t even need “racing” to be involved; I would have just been happy to be able to drive anywhere.

Of course, the tech wasn’t really up to the job of accomplishing that for quite some time; there were early attempts (such as the MS-DOS PC-based follow-up, Test Drive III: The Passion) but it took several generations of gaming hardware before we really got a convincing open-world driving game. That did, however, open the floodgates to such a degree that it’s actually quite rare to have a racing game that isn’t open-world to some extent these days.

Alongside the shift to an open-world approach, many racing games also started to feature a more in-depth metagame, inspired at least in part by the popularity of Gran Turismo on PlayStation. Now, as well as simply winning races, you needed to buy new parts for your car and, in some cases, purchase visual upgrades to make it look cool, too. It didn’t take long for racing games to get to a point where they’d become so sprawling that it was near-impossible to “finish” one of them.

Burnout Paradise certainly has a few of those issues, but it also dials back the complexity in other areas — most notably the “upgrade” aspect. There’s no car customisation beyond paintjobs in Burnout Paradise, just a wide selection of cars and motorcycles to choose from, and honestly, I am happy about that. I don’t know enough about cars to really get an appreciation of what bolting various bits onto a car does aside from making the inevitable little “speed, acceleration, handling” graphs go up, and so upgrade systems always felt like little more than a money-sink to me. So Burnout Paradise’s approach is ideal for me; I can simply unlock new cars as I play, and, in theory, the later cars I unlock will be more powerful and thrilling to drive.

There’s a small issue with the Burnout Paradise Remastered releases, however, and that is how they include all the DLC that was originally released for Burnout Paradise. Now, you might not feel like that is a huge issue — and indeed, the inclusion of the excellent Big Surf Island expansion is very welcome indeed. The issue lies with the DLC cars, which are all massively overpowered compared to those which you unlock through gameplay, and they’re all available right from the beginning.

It would be perfectly understandable for someone to pick one of the “Legendary Cars” (which were formerly brand deals with franchises like Back to the Future, Ghostbusters and the like, but which have since been “de-branded” to lookalikes) and breeze through the entirety of Burnout Paradise, thinking that it was much too easy and poorly balanced.

Thankfully, the DLC cars are separated out from the main game’s cars in the selection menu, so you are free to ignore them as you see fit — and while playing the game “properly”, I would recommend you do so. If you’re playing to piss around, by all means make use of them, but that does take a certain amount of self-discipline.

The gameplay of Burnout Paradise is just as solid as it always has been. The arcadey handling of the cars is excellent, and strikes a good balance between the various vehicles being quite drift-happy but easy to get to grips with. While being a little overly vigorous with the handbrake may well get you spinning out, that’s entirely deliberate; this is a game where a little tap on the brake is all that’s needed for a “practical” drift to help you get around a corner. Handbrake turns are best saved for those times you need to quickly reverse your direction — or perhaps just score some points on a stunt run.

There are only a few event types in Burnout Paradise, but between them they cover the two main things you’ll probably want to be doing in a Burnout game: driving fast and crashing things.

The Race and Burning Route events challenge you to compete against a pack of opponents and the clock respectively, while Road Rage events demand that you smash up as many opponents as you can in a time limit. Marked Man is the reverse, tasking you with reaching a destination while a pack of opponents are trying their best to wreck you. And Stunt Run events see you scoring points through boosting, drifting, jumping and smashing through shortcuts and billboards, with point multipliers on offer for more “out of the ordinary” manoeuvres.

What’s interesting about the events with a “destination” (Race, Burning Route and Marked Man) is that there’s no set route for you to take to that destination, leaving you free to navigate your own way. The game does provide a suggested route for you through the nice touch of your car’s indicators, but you’re free to ignore this and take a different path — or any shortcuts you’re aware of — if you see fit. This is the strength of the open-world racing approach. For some, it’s not necessarily better than games with a carefully designed closed course, but it is distinctive, different and worth exploring.

On top of these, there are more “freeform” activities to play with, too. Every road in the game has “Road Rules”, which include a time to race from one end to the other and an amount of damage to cause in “Showtime” mode, the game’s replacement for the classic self-contained “Crash” modes from earlier Burnout titles.

The game has a full set of offline “par” times and scores for every road to beat, but on the original game’s release, a big attraction was competing against players on your friends list thanks to seamless online integration. This is still possible in Burnout Paradise Remastered, but since this new version is likely being played by significantly fewer players than the original release back when it was current, you’ll likely be primarily competing against the offline times. This is a bit of a shame, but there’s nothing which can really be done about that at this point aside from encouraging your friends to pick up a copy and get a bit of friendly competition going.

The same is true for the actual online multiplayer side of things; at the time of writing, I haven’t given this a go for myself, but I suspect there won’t be many people online most of the time. That’s a shame, as Burnout Paradise online was a lot of fun back in the day, particularly if you were playing with people you knew.

The one little complaint I have about Burnout Paradise Remastered is that EA never like to let you forget that they’re one of the worst companies in video games. Before you can even start playing Burnout Paradise Remastered you have to agree to three separate pages of terms and conditions, manually log in to your console’s online account (Switch Online in my case), log in to an EA account separately, then sit through a lengthy load time.

On top of that, none of the cutscenes in the game are skippable. Granted, none of them are that long, either, but it’s annoying to not be able to skip through things like new cars being delivered to your collection or introduction movies to event types you’re already very familiar with. It smacked of a certain degree of arrogance back in 2008 and it still does now, particularly in a game that is so dead-set on allowing you to play the way you want to play.

Ultimately, this is a relatively minor annoyance, though. The initial Ts and Cs and logins only have to be done the first time you play, and the unskippable cutscenes are infrequent and brief enough that most folks should be able to deal with them. The remainder of the game is just what it always was: a lot of fun, and absolutely packed with things to do.

Burnout Paradise is one of those games where, to a certain degree, you get out of it what you’re willing to put into it. It’s not an aimless, directionless sandbox by any means, but it is a game that becomes markedly more rewarding as you spend more time with it: you’ll get to know the map better and be able to pick out suitable shortcuts for harder events, you’ll unlock new cars that allow you to take on tougher challenges, and you’ll simply have a better feel for the game overall.

It’s a bit of a shame that the game’s age — and the remaster’s age at this point — precludes some of the enjoyable online activities from being as prominent a part of the experience as they were first time around, but there’s still a lot to do here for the solo player, or a pre-organised group of friends.

So to answer the original question: yes, Burnout Paradise is still fun — and not just for nostalgic reasons. In some respects, its straightforward gameplay is quite refreshing compared to more complex, recent games — and the fact you actually have to win races in order to progress puts it a few steps above the more recent Forza Horizon games in my book!

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More about Burnout Paradise

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