I wanted to love it so much..
Positives:
Music selection is good
Car graphics are good
Weather Dynamics are pretty good!
Car Customization is very well done
Negatives:
Menus ( Too much of these little side menus.. the video and game options have no business there TBH, makes it have too much clutter)
Distant environment graphics can look bland and not as defined... I think they could have employed better tactics to hide this
Photo Mode looks a bit rough, can use some polishing
Lack of open world variety (No desert areas, no urban city areas, it is all pacific mid-west style terrain)
I remember this game had some type of tag that read "From the creators of burnout" or some connotation like that, cant say verbatim but the idea had definitely been planted therefore, the standard also was conceived. Burnout paradise pretty much does everything better gameplay wise and sometimes even graphically. The game definitely has vision and I think the game should have been worked on more before it got released. Let me expound on that:
As of 10/28/25
* There are various wreck glitches where if you so much as scrape a civi car, you crash
* Sometimes you have invisibility where you don't even get into a wreck and that goes for the rival cars on the map when exploring as well.
* Some car's customization like paint or engine sounds reset or get randomize upon an event retry
* Sometimes the respawn rate of cars in roadrage is too low. For example:
sometimes I would have a goal of 5/5, 3 spawn, i take down the 3s but I'm left
either waiting for some cars to spawn behind me or trying to catch up to the
cars that spawn way ahead of me, causing me to sometimes fail the event.
* The cars handling needs more work: Racing type cars handling have the habit of sharp turning too sharp very unpredictably, the muscle cars handle like boats which is good for them but its too much here..
* For all the pandemonium these drivers cause, there are quite a few police cars and ambulances patrolling with their sirens on, but they will do absolutely nothing about you or your rivals rending them useless.. just decor. Its a bit of a nitpick but annoying when you start realizing this, why even have them there?
These things can indeed be fixed with patches and updates but what actually did it for me was the simple fact that, aside from my own fault in buying the game and thinking i would get the experience advertised was that, This is a game designed for online multiplayer in general, specifically with friends. This GOG version does not seem like it supports that hence it is listed as single player. More than half if not half of this game is exactly that. The live mixing is a core functionality that its centered around online play. Therefore, I had to refund the game because of the realization that this was going to get old and boring fast since I wont be playing with anyone..
Also, this:
"This will be a World that you can decorate and personalize, either alone or in collaboration with your friends online. A place of your own where you can continually strive to outrace, out-stunt or even out-crash yourself and others with courses, tracks and game modes designed by you – or your friends – but yours will probably be better."
That already broke my heart.. If such core feature is not available for GOG users than that $39.99 pricetag should be looking like $19.99 .. I had to refund the game.
Oh and BTW,
There is some concerns floating around about the assets of this game and how telling it is about this being an Unreal Engine Slop (Generic) or an asset flip, and while there is still fun to be had, its a little hard to unsee once you start noticing things like that!
I can keep writing about so much nuances and negative things but I believe is because I really wanted this game to be the best it could be, and my regards to the ~10 people that worked on this game for making this game but in all honesty, this game should have been play tested a whole lot before rushing to a release and I say this in honest criticism and genuine desire to see a modern type burnout game that would be the ultimate experience.
10 gamers found this review helpful