Burnout Paradise is a fast paced racing game. With the well loved road rage and the new challenges and burning routes it is even better than ever before and its rival car games haven’t a chance of being better. The licence system allows you to see how close you are tog getting your skill to the best it can be. Starting off as a learner and progressing through the ranks to get your elite licence. With over 70 cars available there is always a new car to test drive or try new jumps with; you can also change the colour of the car to suit your liking.

The different game modes, there is a variety of things that you can do to get closer to your next licence. Including the old fashioned race, everybody’s favourite road rage, marked man, stunt run and burning route. The races are always high speed and full of takedowns, starting at a junction in the road your aim is to get to one of the eight major landmarks in Paradise city. Road rage, where you have to takedown the designated amount of cars to win a big favourite in the burnout series with different ways of taking cars down, now available in anytime online with up to eight people at the press of a button. Marked man, marked man is an objective race, you have to race to the designated area without your car being trashed by two or more drivers trying to shut you off the road. Stunt run, you have to drive around paradise city and win points from stunts that you perform, you have a certain amount of time to get a certain amount of points. And the last race mode is the burning route, you choose a car a drive to its unique burning route (every car has a different burning route that can only be done by that certain car) upon arrival of the starting point you start the burning route and have to get to your destination against the clock. If you successfully complete a burning route then you get an upgraded version of the car that you were using.

Online play, the online play is the only aspect of multiplayer available at this point in time, in 2009 an update will be brought out which will allow two players on one console. The online play is cool, up to eight players in one game. The online play isn’t like most other car games, it allows you to freeburn around Paradise city which means you can just drive around and do whatever you want. From freeburn you can set one of the 490 challenges or create a race, with your own starting point and destination, you can also set a marked man a road rage or a stunt run. Most of the time I have spent on freeburn is just driving around and messing about with my friends, usually showing off my new car.

In Paradise city you can drive around and almost all the time find things to collect. Such as the 400 smashes, where you have to drive through gates. Or the billboards which you have to drive through. There is also a load of stunt jumps for you to find. If you are good enough to find all of them then you can focus on the cars. Getting all 76 of the cars is a challenge as you have to do all the events to get them. When you get all the smashes, billboards, stunt jumps, found all the car parks and drive-throughs and got all the cars then you will have your elite licence making loads of play time.

Overall Burnout Paradise has created a new type of car game that has great single player and online play.

Kingsley