Burnout Paradise

For true next-gen arcade racing thrills Burnout Paradise is most definitely your best option.

Take me down to the Paradise City, where the gameplay’s clean and the cars are pretty! Now you can partake in the car-nage on modern consoles, as long as you don’t get burnt out!

May it be the likes of Shadow of the Colossus or Metal Gear Solid, if it’s quite there but not enough to push the boundaries, it’s still an awesome game.

This abrupt change to the Burnout series may have been a huge risk on Criterion's part, but it's one that's paid off big time. When you break through the games overwhelming exterior, there is a solid and extremely playable game to be found, with an absolute feast of events and challenges to partake in. Dig a little deeper and there is a whole host of extra content waiting for the more committed gamers amongst us to explore.

In fact, that’s a pretty good sentiment to sum up Paradise as a whole. There’s definitely enough gameplay gold here to make it worth a look for fans of the series, but it’s a real pity that Criterion made the decision to make the game less user-friendly than it could have been. While Paradise still has the quintessential Burnout feel, it is quite a different game, and simple elements such as restarting challenges, selecting events from the map and changing cars on the fly would have made the transition to this new Burnout all the smoother. Still, it’s a blisteringly fast rough and tumble racer...

Criterion said that they wanted to craft a stunning, truly next-gen game for their next-gen debut, and they have done: there’s almost nothing wrong with Burnout Paradise – bar the graphical annoyances, albeit minor, that afflict those without HD – and so much that they’ve done right. If you’re a racing fan, you must own this. It’s simple.

In the recent months over the Christmas period of 2007 the game market has stalled, bringing to a halt the mad rush of games we had just started getting used to. One thing which will not be stalled however is your car, in Criterion Games latest offering of the Burnout series, titled Paradise. After the huge success of Burnout Revenge on the Xbox 360 and other titles on former systems such as Burnout 3: Takedown, it was inevitable that another Burnout game would be released. So, could Criterio...