Burnout Paradise is, by far, the most open and interesting //Burnout game we've ever played. Playing past //Burnout games has been a very linear experience and getting stuck at a certain point, unable to get the 400 takedowns needed to progress within the space of two minutes, could be a major bummer.

/ /Paradise gets rid of that annoyance with an extremely elegant solution, re-designing the entire game so effortlessly and naturally that you might struggle to believe that there was ever a //Burnout game that wasn't like this.

Does it have flaws? Yes, clearly. The most major one is obvious when you fail a race and have to hike back across the entire map in order to restart -- a simple quick-travel or retry function would have been a welcome addition. The same is true when players want to change their car and have to spend a while hunting down one of the five junkyards on the map.

Still, ignore that and the lack of offline multiplayer and / /Burnout Paradise is clearly a new highpoint for the series. Sure, it's annoying not to be able to fight your friends up-close, but for a game this good it's something we can learn to live without and, honestly, we're far too addicted to the Showtime gamemode to say anything really bad about this otherwise excellent game.