Burnout will be released on PC. No, you are not being pranked, everything is serious. Friv5Online Racing Games is giving PC owners a generous gift this year - the best arcade car racing game in the universe. With the most beautiful car accidents in history. We played the Xbox 360 version and are ready to tell you in detail what kind of game awaits us this fall.
But first, a little history. If you follow the news from the console world, then you probably know that Burnout is the main reason for consoles owners to turn up their noses at the combination of the words Need for Speed and condescendingly look at the research of Bugbear in the Flatout series . Here's the thing: Burnout- not really a race. That is, the classic Race mode is, of course, present here, but the emphasis is seriously shifted towards, to put it mildly, traffic violations. Each car is equipped with nitro-acceleration, which is earned for ignoring these very rules: driving in the opposite lane, dangerous overtaking traffic and, of course, accidents.
Accidents - the calling card of the series - looked great before, but in Burnout Paradise they reached some absolutely unattainable heights. Cars crumple into accordions, fly into the air, lose their windows, doors, wheels, and all this splendor is demonstrated in a spectacular slo-mo, and the camera is happy to snatch out the most favorable angles. Taking into account the fact that an average accident here occurs every five to ten seconds and completely fills the nitro acceleration scale, it is easy to guess about the surest way to win the race: knock your opponents off the track, sending them on an unplanned date with the nearest concrete fence.
The apogee of all this disgrace is the Road Rage mode, in which there are dozens and hundreds of accidents (in the game they are called Takedowns). Prizes are usually limited to a certain number of knockdowns, and the race can be finished with gold or silver. And you can continue to educate negligent rivals - after all, as you know, there is no limit to perfection.
There are other modes as well. For example, Marked Man will offer us to participate in survival races, where you need to get to the finish line without getting hit by angry opponents. Burning Route is a seemingly ordinary circuit time trial, but new cars are given out as a reward, on which you must, first, pass the track. And Stunt Run, as you might guess from the name, asks from the player the most dense and frequent combined various tricks - from drifting and crashing traffic, to jumping from trampolines and knocking down billboards, which are so generously studded with Paradise City.
Yes, we have come to the most important and serious innovation, which puts Burnout Paradise on a completely new stage in the development of the series - the fictional city, Paradise City. In a huge metropolis, in detail not inferior even to Liberty City from GTA 4, you can move around absolutely freely: the menu with a choice of events and the campaign devoid of a plot from the previous series went to the trash can. Now we have to travel in search of one hundred and twenty traffic lights scattered around the map - the starting points of the races. Occasionally returning to the garage to change the car of one of three classes - one is better for racing, the second is for destroying opponents, and the third is for performing combinations of tricks. Another interesting novelty is filling and repair stations. The former compensate for the nitro acceleration, while the latter deprive the car of visible damage. By the way, the tracks are now unlimited - the path to the finish line can be laid along the most unexpected lanes, referring to the street signs and the mini-map. That at a speed of 400 kilometers per hour is not so easy.
Multiplayer makes you remember aboutTest Drive Unlimited and NFS: Motor City Online - to fill the city with live rivals, you just need to press a button right during the game. It is not entirely clear how this will be implemented on a PC, but, apparently, we cannot do without a raw and unfinished Windows Live service.
Desura Racing Games, if you don't know, not only the creators of the Burnout racing series and the Black shooter , but also the authors of the popular multiplatform Renderware engine (see it, for example, in all three-dimensional GTAlast generation), so you don't need to worry about graphics and performance: on consoles, the game ran without visible loadings with 60 frames per second and looked the best of all video game races on the planet at the time of its release. Porting is handled by Criterion personally , promising support for high resolutions, shameful optimization and the possibility of custom modifications - we are waiting soon after the release of an improved fleet of cars, including real models of cars authored by folk craftsmen (in the game, all cars are deprived of brands for the sake of being able to crush them into a cake).
For dessert, a licensed soundtrack that has always been a hallmark of the series. Names for all tastes: Guns'n'Roses, Depeche Mode, Faith No More and even Avril Lavigne. Throughout the game, we are tirelessly accompanied by advice from DJ Atomica, the host of the local radio station Crash FM, who has appeared in many games from Friv5Online Racing Games. There is no need to talk about the quality of game sounds - motors roar, tires squeal, iron rattles, deforming. Everything is like in your life if it consisted of continuous car accidents.
For Burnout Paradise , many updates have been released and are still being released - in some the developers add a change of day and night, in others - new cars, and in the third - they threaten to introduce motorcycles. Most likely, all of them will already be included in the PC version, but Criterion continues to develop the game and support for such free patches in the future will be very useful.
Free gameplay and one huge city, which replaced the strict list of races and tracks in different cities of the world, caused bewilderment among some zealous fans of the series - they say, why change what has been tested by time. But we still like such interesting changes much more than the stamping of similar twin games - since Burnout 2, only the graphics have changed significantly in the series. It remains to wait for autumn and plunge into a dizzying whirlwind of spectacular accidents and insane speeds. For the first time in the history of the series - on personal computers.