Breakneck speed and broken glass, that’s what Burnout is all about. This entry in the series takes you to Paradise City, and it seems that Paradise is quite a risky place to be indeed. The whole city is offered to you from the start, there are no invisible barriers to be found here, just a completely free experience from the moment you start up your car.

This Burnout experience is new because of the untold freedom that it brings you. Don’t want to do traditional racing for the first part of the game? Then go ahead and seek out all the Marked Man or Road Rage events until your heart is content. Maybe you just don’t feel like completing any events at all, well you are free to simply roam the city as much as you want, but that can become a bit tiresome after a while. The city claims to have more than 150 miles of road to drive on, and I believe them. The city is very expansive, ranging from a ship harbor to a mountain road all the way into a downtown city set of roads. It is your job in this game to find all the race events scattered around the city, which are all located at the street intersections strewn about the city. This can become a bit tiresome for a couple reasons. All the races end at just a few locations around the city. Yes, this does allow for you to recognize the ending location to decide the best route, but for variety’s sake it can become annoying to race to the country club 7 times in a row.

There is also no restart event option if you find yourself losing a race. You have to stop your car for the event to end, and then try and remember the starting location so that you can drive back there and begin the race again. This makes the open world concept start to drag. Unlike a game like Need for Speed where the open world becomes optional, where you can choose races from the menu screen, here in Paradise you can only look at the race from the map menu. While this is useful in trying to find your way back, it seems like a simple addition could have been a “go to” button rather than just a “view race” option which lets you see the route that a particular event takes through the city.

Slightly making up for this is the inclusion of the “Showtime Mode” which has taken the place of the crash modes from previous Burnouts. Just press the two shoulder buttons on a crowded street and you can propel your car down the street as a rolling pile of metal. Using the boost button you make your car keep rolling as you plow through any car that comes your way. Hit buses to get a multiplier added onto your score and make the carnage really last. This mode is fun, especially when the damage total is finally added up, but I still liked the crash modes from the previous game where you got to send the driver out of the windshield to see how far he could go. Maybe that would just be too graphic for the kids on this next-gen hardware.