Burnout Paradise Review

I've been thinking about getting some type of racing game lately. After talking with some friends today I went ahead and picked up Burnout Paradise. After having only played the game for about an hour, I'm glad I picked it up.

Immediately when you load up the game, it throws you into the driver's seat. All the instructions and tutorials are done on the fly while you're driving around. If you've ever played Crackdown this will seem very familiar. The game is set in Paradise City, a lone city on an island with no exit. You can drive around the city as much as you'd like. You can unlock cars and paint jobs by finishing challenges. If you just like driving around, you can do that too. Challenges are triggered by coming to a stop light and holding down both the gas & brakes at the same time. There are different kinds of challenges, such as races or road rage.

My personal favorite so far is Road Rage. In this type of challenge you get a time limit during which you need to wreck a certain number of opponents. Against the AI, this isn't too hard. My first one required me to wreck 3 opponents in 3 minutes....I ended up with 27. Online play lets you play with up to 7 other players. Everyone is in the city and you can race either other or compete in any of the other challenges.

The graphics in this game are amazing. The entire game is displayed at 60 fps and in high definition. Every time you get in a wreck or knock someone else off the road, you get a nice slow motion effect. Every time that happened I was wanting to have my capture card going. Yeah, it's that good.

Overall I'd have to give the game a 8/10 rating. Not the best xbox game out there, but still, it's worth buying and worth playing. I see many more hours of wreckage in my future.