Where The Grass Can Kill And The Online Is Shitty

I finally finished Burnout Paradise. Got through all of the offline achievements. Some of the achievements required the Xbox Live Vision Camera which I do not have.

I actually preferred the sandbox style gameplay compared to the "select a track" version. It further differentiates Burnout from the "normal" racing games. Having an event at every intersection and being able to showtime and road rule every street made it feel like I was really racing in a city.

The online how ever was less enjoyable. You have lists of challenges that require a specific number of people but people can join your party at any time making them unavailable. If someone leaves while a challenge is in progress it might be canceled, depending on which challenge it is. And the challenges require participation from every member in your party. So if someone isn't helping out,which in my experience is around 60%, you have to kick them and end the challenge. Which means everyone who was working on the challenge gets punished for their hard work. If the host leaves everyone gets kicked out of the game and you have to search for another match.

Those are mostly complaints about the community so I'll separate my technical problems here. You can't track challenge progress while doing challenges, unless you're the host, which I think is weird. That means you can't request specific challenges because you can't see which challenges you have completed for that specific number of people. When creating a "room" you can't specify that you want to do challenges or races. It only displays the last thing you did, which is nothing if you just started.

To be fair, I often complain about the online aspects of games but I rarely play online games when they first come out. That means the online community is smaller and the online experience will be different than someone who played the game when it first came out.

All in all I did enjoy the game. The amount of vehicles and the customization were definitely pluses. People complain about DLC but this game did offer a lot of options. None of which were required to enjoy the game. *cough* Halo. *cough*.

I ended up with 780/1250g. Pretty good if you don't count DLC.