The Burnout franchise has made its impact on the racing world with two major features, crashes and high speed, and Paradise is giving you more of what you’ve been craving.  This year EA brought us the newest edition to the Burnout franchise, the fast paced beauty we know as Paradise. Burnout Paradise takes place in the gigantic Paradise City, a city is filled with hundreds of races, events, and things to smash. That’s right, smash. There are over 100 billboards and 400 smash fences, and it gets more thrilling each time you break through one of them, and it’s also pretty fun to see how many you can actually find.

The single player mode allows you to roam around Paradise City, racing other cars and trying to get marks on your license. After winning a race or event you get a mark, and marks on your license go toward upgrading your license (if only that were true in real life).  At first upgrades are easy to get because you don’t need that many marks, but as you go along though it gets harder, because you have to get more and more marks each time. After a certain number of marks, your license gets upgraded, unlocking new cars.  Each car has it’s own specialty, so you can match it to your style of play.

Each intersection has a race or an event, and one event that is my favorites would have to be Stunt Run. In Stunt Run you have to accumulate a certain number of points to get a mark on your license. You earn points by doing specific tasks like using turbo or getting air after jumping off a ramp. Some Stunt Runs are easy because there are ramps near by, but others require some major traveling. The other events include Road Rage, where you have to take down other players in the race to earn points, or another fast action mode called Marked Man. In marked man you have to try to get to a specified point on the map without being destroyed by the other cars.  This can be pretty tough sometimes, but after many headfirst blows into a pole you’ll get better.

In Burnout Paradise, there are quite a few ways to unlock new cars. One way is by winning a Burning Route, which you can only use certain cars to participate in. Another way is by getting marks on your license. After each upgrade on your license a car becomes available and you have to find the car and take it down to send it to the junkyard.  This can be easier said than done, especially when you find yourself weaving in and out of traffic to take down an extremely fast and agile car.

While it’s extremely easy to get wrapped up in the fun and fast paced singleplayer, wait until you step online with a few friends. While playing Burnout online you start out Free Burning with a group of other players. What’s Free Burning you ask? Free Burning is when you drive around Paradise City trying to break and set records for the day in that party. Some of the records are longest jump distance, most barrell rolls, or most damage accumulated in a wreck. It adds a challenging aspect to the game, and can be a wonderful time killer. After you are done Free Burning, the party leader sets a race, and you try to beat your party members to a certain point on the map.  One of the better things online is how much control you have.  When you are the party leader you get to control where you race to, and even the limit to what cars you can use.

One of the most unique things that Paradise brings to the online world, would be the seamless integration of the online selection menus.  To invite another player into your free roam, you simply just navigate on the d-pad while you drive, and the invite is sent.  There’s no interruption in gameplay, and that’s one of the most comforting factors we’ve seen in online play in years.  Want to change the game mode while you’re driving?  It’s just as simple as inviting a player into your match, keeping the games fast and fun.

With very solid gameplay, Paradise delivers slightly above average graphics.  While there is nothing too incredibly stunning about the graphics, the cars do have some pretty cool definition to them though, and the buildings and cliffs are pretty realistic, but overall it’s nothing to stop and watch. The sound on the other hand is very life-like and extremely believable.  Listening to a car zoom by sounds just like a car in real life, but the crash sound truly takes the cake.  There’s nothing quite like driving down the strip and ramming into barrier and jumping in shock from the sound and slow-motion impact.

One feature that is pretty amusing is the slo-mo movement when something spectacular(or not so spectacular) happens.  When you crash the game goes into slow-motion and you watch in horror( or amusement) as your car is slowly crushed by a gas station sign.  Or when you find super jumps, you get to enjoy the epic jump slowly as cross a canyon or a river.  It is so exciting it makes you want to be in the car you are driving.

Overall, this is a great game if you are into fast paced, quick reaction games. This game does take some practice to master, but after you become familiar with Paradise City the game gets easier. For the experienced racing game fans, multiplayer for this game is a good way to test your skills.  Single player is a little bit challenging, but it becomes boring too easily.  The game does suffer from not even being on the top 10 list of Xbox Live played games per week, and just has not seen the audience that the hype claims it should have.   Burnout Paradise is  a title that Xbox 360 owners should at least give a rent if nothing else, just to enjoy the sheer sense of speed and wonderful online integration.