"TAAAAAAAAKE MEEEEEEE HOOOOOME!!!"

Burnout Paradise is the latest installment to the ever popular Burnout racing series. As usual, it pwns all of the other racing games in existence.
So, what's new you ask? For one thing, the game is a bit more realistic than previous Burnouts. The physics are a lot better, and you have a chance of wiping out when you land a jump.
Oh, and one major thing to note is that the entire game is open-world. The Race events, Road Rage Events, all of Paradise City is open to you all of the time. You will need to learn the roads, so expect to spend a lot of time trying to get good, because just mindlessly ramming into your opponents won't cut it this time around. You need to actually navigate like in real life driving (except at two-hundred miles an hour instead of two). It takes a lot of patience, because early on in the game you will need to flip open your map to see where you're headed. After you make it past the harsh learning curve, the game is loads of fun, and you have that unparalleled sense of satisfaction of not needing to use the maps anymore.
Thankfully, the guys at Criterion have made things easy for you. The entire city is amazingly detailed- every building, every road, every tree, is different. The last time I saw a city so detailed was in Assassin's Creed, and that's saying something.
The game offers a few new events, specifically Marked Man and Stunt Run. Marked Man has you racing for your life to reach the finish while everyone else tries to take you down. In Stunt Run, you will be pulling off tricks to keep your combo going. Both are definitely welcome additions to the series.
Paradise also has plenty of hours of content. You have plenty of events, plus some gates to crash (literally), billboards to smash, and super jumps to land. Every road has two sets of high scores to beat, and if you're connected to Xbox Live, you will be competing to beat your friends' high scores. There's obviously online races and such, as expected. Yet there's also over 500 online challenges to complete with friends. You'll be doing anything from getting 40 near misses each to landing jumps over the other seven players. It's a lot more fun than it sounds. You'll be playing well into the year with all of the content Paradise offers.
The downloadable content for the game is also worth noticing. So far the best stuff has been motorcyles and night and day effects, but Criterion say that they have plenty more planned, including an entire island coming out later this year. On Feb. 6, Criterion will be releasing a free update polishing the game a bit more, by adding a restart option and making some of the cars easier to handle, so newbies can join in on the fun a bit more easily. Get The Ultimate Box if you only play offline.
Unfortunately, everything is not all hunky dory. Impact Time and Crashbreakers are gone, in addition to the much-loved Crash mode. Crash mode has been replaced with Showtime mode, in which you press both bumpers on your controller at any given moment outside of an event and try to steer your wreck into oncoming cars. It's a bit easy and definitely not the replacement that it was intended to be.
Also, the game's soundtrack is atrocious. They even went as far as including the Avril Lavigne song Girlfriend. Yes, you read that right. The only good song would have to be Paradise City (of course; what else?) by Guns n' Roses. I definitely recommend playing your own music this time around. Oh, and Crash FM got a DJ again. He doesn't just interrupt your songs this time, he also taunts you when you lose now.
On a side note, get an HDTV if you hate blurry graphics.
Overall, Burnout Paradise is a very good racing game. If you love Burnout and other driving games, and/or you're willing to spend some time learning something new, this game is well worth whatever you have to pay for it.