Burnout Paradise is possibly the best driving game on current-gen consoles. You may never buy another racing game again.
User Rating: 10 | Burnout Paradise X360
I have had Burnout Paradise since November. I know many others who have had it since it's release, over a year ago, and still play almost every day. The game is just that good. Where can I begin? Burnout Paradise excels in every way a racing game should, and does so much more. Before I start breaking down the gameplay, I'd like to talk about the unique draw of Burnout Paradise that other games don't deliver. Have you ever found yourself so frustrated playing Grand Turismo that you just want to smash the other cars right off the road? Well in this game you can, it's even encouraged! But if you are more of a mellow player you can race the clean way, or work on setting the best time on one of the 64 roads in Burnout Paradise's unique open world. If you are more of a show off, you can focus on stunt runs, which revolve around doing crazy barrel rolls and spins in your car to get the highest score possible. And did I mention that any of these game modes can be taken online to play with friends? One minute you can be in the middle of a race then touch a few buttons on the D-Pad, and your in the middle of an on-line road rage with your friends! That is the one other unique draw of Burnout Paradise, the social interaction. When I first started playing the game, I enjoyed the offline mode, but it was back on my shelf in a couple of weeks. I thought it would be another mediocre game. Then I decided to take it online, and it was a whole different world! I became friends with a few other players and we worked on some of Burnout's 490 unique online challenges. These may include anything from driving your car 3000 yards in oncoming traffic, to leaping over the other player's cars off a huge jump. Soon enough I could recognize most of the people I saw playing and now I can always find some friends to play online with. But like every game it still has it's faults, and I'll be fair and discuss them too. If you are a newer player who is unfamiliar with driving games in general, you may find Burnout Paradise pretty difficult to start with. I grew very frustrated in my early hours of play. Now with well over 100 hours of game time, it's pretty much a breeze. This issue isn't as bad as it used to be though. Criterion Games (the developers) have released a free update that makes many facets of the game easier and more user friendly. The only other real problem I can think of with the game is the numerous bugs and glitches. At one point there was a huge problem on the PS3 version of the game where the race would freeze at the beginning on most online races. A big part of the game was out of commission for a long time. A patch has since been released, but even more bugs are being reported all the time. To me this doesn't detract from the overall score of a 10. There are just to many good things in this game to turn your nose up at it because of a few technical issues. And with all the new DLC being released (which includes a new game mode, new cars, and even a new island), Burnout Paradise has no end in sight. 
