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Best Games - Burnout Paradise

Does the idea of spinning donuts around the infield of a baseball stadium sound appealing? Would you like to launch a car off a ramp, sail an unreasonable distance, and nail a perfect 4 wheel landing losing no momentum? Would you like to nudge a supercar into a barrier and watch it crumple like foil knowing there would be no consequences or injuries? What if you could drive impossibly fast not only over the road, but through buildings, on train tracks, on park pathways, and more? Burnout Paradise has you covered.
Burnout Paradise might be a perfect driving game. You will notice that I didn’t write ‘Racing Game’. Burnout Paradise is a driving game. It’s an exploration game. It’s a toy car sandbox game. There is racing in it but it’s not, strictly speaking, a racing game. The draw of the game is not the racing. I suppose for some people it might be but the game isn’t really designed around the racing. It’s designed around the driving.
No matter what you do in the open world of Burnout Paradise, the game tracks it. How far you drive. How fast you drive. How much time you spend in the air. How many flips and spins you do. How many cars you crash, both your own and your opponents. If it’s a trackable stat the game probably tracks it. The game tracks it and then rewards you for it. It incentivizes driving over winning races or completing challenges. Burnout Paradise is a game about driving.
There are a lot of people who didn’t like it when the Burnout series shifted from the focused event based structure to a flowing open world with potential events at every intersection. There were complaints that it took too long to get from one event to another, or that it was too easy to get lost in the labyrinth of city streets and shortcuts. Not liking a game is no real crime. There are and were certainly other games for people who didn’t enjoy the open world of Paradise, but I can’t help but feel like they missed the point.
It’s a driving game not a racing game.
The events are secondary to the reason you load the game up. You play Burnout Paradise to drive. You play it to drive in the most irresponsible and chaotic way possible. You play it to manifest fantastical driving situations. You play it to enjoy the feeling of speed and impact and exploration.
Burnout Paradise is about driving and it is one of the best games.

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