Last night, Tha R1gga and I decided to fire up the Burnout Paradise demo and see what multiplayer was like. I played single player about two weeks ago, but only for maybe 20 minutes or so. That wasn’t really sufficient to give any kind of opinion. Last night, however, we spent over an hour playing the demo. Find out what my impressions are after the jump.


First off, I had a decent amount of fun in the 20 minutes I spent playing single player. It was a little difficult finding events to participate in, since the demo only gives a few to whet your appetite. I did share the concern of many others out on the intarwebs. That is: Why would I want to spend five minutes driving to an event when I used to be able to get to it with a couple button presses? This seems like a pretty big waste of time.

After playing with someone else, it all became clear. As long as you’re having fun getting from A to B, who cares if you’re in an event or not? We spent the first 15 minutes or so driving around trying to figure out what we could do in multiplayer. None of the intersections showed any events once we were in a game together, which confused us for a while. Even though we didn’t have anything specific to do, we still had fun taking each other down and checking out new paint jobs. We eventually figured out what we were supposed to do. The demo has three events that can be played with two players. These events are triggered by pausing the game and choosing the event from a menu. Once started, you still may need to drive to the starting point of the event.

One of the events required each of us to smash through six Burnout billboards. This event took us the longest amount of time, by far, but it was great because it forced us to explore the city. One of the highlights of this exploration was finding a parking garage that we could drive to the top of. We caught some sweet air off that bad boy.

Anyway, the main point I wanted to make was this: After finishing all three events, we spent about 15 minutes just driving around chasing each other and trying to get takedowns. I can’t tell you how stupid we probably would have looked if someone was watching us, but we had a blast. It was then that I realized the vision that Criterion had for this game. They’ve been facing a lot of criticism for making some pretty big changes to this franchise, but after last night’s multiplayer shenanigans, I’m convinced they know exactly what they’re doing. It’s all about having fun, no matter what you’re doing. Staring at a loading screen is not fun. Doing a barrel roll over your buddy’s car is extremely fun.

If you’re on Live and you see myself or Tha R1gga playing some Burnout, feel free to hit us up for an invite. We’d love try it out with more people.