Notebooks are the videogames journalist’s lifesaver. Time after time slovenly bug-ridden pieces of code are placed before our bloodshot eyes, pierced with so many gaping holes memory just isn’t enough. Even when this isn’t the case, some artistic metaphors about how games are like a walk in the mountains, or perhaps that first crisp breath on a winter’s morn, fill our minds and must be committed to paper. That’s just who we are. Other times though, the games we play satisfy a desire so primal (and, in this case, yokel) that there’s really no need to waste any of mother earth’s resources noting it down. We’ll let the fact we straddle two cars to work take care of that.

Getting back to the point for a minute, Burnout Paradise offered so little to irk us that our notes extended to barely half a page – the sum total of features that provided cause for concern. In highly unusual fashion, we’ll deal with these first. To start, the series’ famed crash mechanics have been tweaked just a little, bidding a fond farewell to an ability to bat oncoming cars away in all directions. While this gives the game a pleasing touch of weight, it also means that even the slightest clip of a drone car travelling across your path mid-race means instant on-your-roof terror. In a game where at least 40 per cent or so of what it takes to win races is luck, adding this effect into the bargain, pretty as crashes are, can frustrate. Of course, this also means that bothering to upgrade cars is made just that little bit pointless; the strength stats having little overall affect on how you race.

Moving on (and you might be able to tell how desperately we searched for faults here) it’s not possible to customise the controls. An hour or so’s gaming in you’ll be struggling to care, but a game without speed indication isn’t in dire need of analogue acceleration and braking. The kerb often does that last one for you, after all. Lastly on our list of devil’s jockstrap-ness comes that most EA of complaints: rubber-banding of races. This is actually a rather unusual complaint, insofar as we can understand why you might lose a race after being up top all the way – a crash proves good enough reason. However, what we can’t understand is why routes with but half a mile to travel can be conquered from last place by fearless use of turbo. It’s not even like traffic levels are particularly lethal to counter this. So, in summary, that’s 270 odd words of complaint spread across the game’s entire life span. Trust us – such harsh, harsh words will appear as the merest broken wing-mirror shard three miles down the tarmac within five seconds of each time you put pedal to the metal and hang on for dear life.

As covered previously ad nauseam, Burnout Paradise’s big draw over its predecessors is the overall setting. Gone are the tubular tracks and rigidly defined crash junctions, replaced by a whole city (see if you can guess what it’s called). While it’s not exactly living and breathing (heck, if EA’s policy on family censorship means the cars don’t have drivers, there’s not a cat in hell’s chance of pedestrians), there’s certainly a multitude of nooks and crannies to be discovered.

Included among these treats are the events themselves, accessed not via apparently filthy menus but by momentarily spinning your wheels at any junction with traffic lights. Well over a hundred such start points exist within the city limits, giving Paradise an ability to convince you there’s some kind of engulfing world surrounding you, while also offering an opportunity to jump in, quickly complete an event or two then jump straight out again. Our initial concerns about whether this system would leave you desperately searching a labyrinthine map for the remaining half dozen events later on have been allayed – your map is refreshed with every new license class. That’s plus ten points to EA, then.

Regardless of such structural joys, there’s an extent to which Burnout Paradise’s identity crisis is worse than Marilyn Manson and Eddie Izzard combined. Stretching no doubt for that illusive casual market, we aren’t entirely sure Criterion isn’t in fact deeply embarrassed to be working on a videogame, and can’t decide whether it would rather take on, say, The Fast And The Furious or some such instead. How so? Well, there’s the obvious ‘getting rid of menus’ thing, which is somewhat akin to encyclopedia writers getting rid of an index on the grounds people might stumble across information they’d never heard before. While as far as reinventing the wheel goes this can be considered a roaring success, why make so big a deal of throwing away a navigation system used since the dawn of time, saying it shakes gamers out of the overall atmosphere? Why do this, indeed, when in order to unlock cars you must take them down as they ‘randomly’ appear from right behind you between events – a process that’s about as transparent as our insistence that Dead Or Alive has sound fighting mechanics. Why, indeed, make gamers trundle to one of six in-world junkyards in order to change cars (with the almost invariable result of driving straight past something you want to do), when whopping great scores garishly fill the screen during almost every kind of event? It’s pretty difficult to forget you’re playing a videogame then, we can tell you.

Of course, the fact that said vehicle changes become necessary pretty quickly due to differences in boost behaviour between them adds to the fun. So what point are we trying to make? Probably that when the action on offer is so heartpumping and adrenaline packed there’s no need to pretend it’s all real. We know there’s a pensions crisis in this country but why does Criterion want to give the elderly and infirm heart attacks? That’s just cruel, man.

It’s all because every hair-raising turn and near-death experience is pure, unadulterated (and largely uncomplicated) Burnout. There’s no over-exaggerated checking of chassis into the barriers, the default camera’s actually been placed in a position where upcoming threats can easily be seen and the handling is a joyous mix of instant response and OutRun-style rollercoaster drifting. Sure, a condescending American DJ is still present and incorrect, but you can’t have everything. Like Christmas nibbles started in the spirit of general family well-being alongside a platter of fat-free white meat and steamed vegetables, the calorie-controlled slices of gaming Paradise offers never fully satisfies. Before you know it, it’s February and you’re as wide as you are tall, full of regret and can’t get rid of the faint smell of cheese. We’re not sure which of the two images this description applies to, so use your imagination. Suffice to say, the time to stop will be when continuing proves medically impossible. Much like the aforementioned dinner, in fact.

This accessibility isn’t limited to the next time a set of traffic lights is found (though this, of course, will only be a matter of 15 seconds at the most) – in a move most in touch with the series’ past lunacy, Showtime mode effectively replaces crash junctions totally. Accessed literally at any point (meaning cut-scenes of almost any kind can be eliminated, too), a quick dash of the bumpers will see your vehicle fly into the air with all the grace of an ice-skating stick insect. Using the A-button to fling yourself skywards upon landing and directional controls to coax your car around (just like in real life!) you can skip down the road until you either run out of boost, or give up entirely. This is wonderfully absurd stuff and not without point as, such is Criterion’s ability to integrate all aspects of rule-less racing, each road will have a crash high score attached to it, which appears as a target when Showtime is activated. Thanks to this, players will be able to rule each road on their own console, among their Friends List and even worldwide.

You see, each road in the 50 or so square miles of turf Paradise has to offer sports its own name, much like in real life. As mentioned in previous issues of X360, the idea was for gamers online to suggest roads on which to meet – an idea that seemed strange and alien to us at the time with such a large environment to learn. The truth however is that attempting to master each road’s Showtime and quickest time records soon has the city’s landscape etched in your mind like the streets of your home town. Though the many shortcuts on offer take a little longer to appear in your mind’s eye, simply cruising the streets looking for the barriers closing them off proves just entertaining enough to soften the blow of commutes for at least ten hours’ gaming. If there was ever a game capable of keeping you entertained simply through an overwhelming mass of stuff to do, this is it.

Erm, yes. At the end of the day, the summation of this review would read as an account of the difficulty of translating an interior rush of adrenaline into stupid, incompetent words. If we were Jeremy Clarkson, we would simply do a piece to camera as we yelled the words ‘speed!’ and ‘power!’, while uttering something uncomplimentary about Americans. Unfortunately, humble ink and paper doesn’t allow us to do that. Apart from his inability to walk away from 150 miles per hour collisions, the feelings described are identical. If, by some quirk of EU law, a game could be released packaged with some kind of stimulant drug (Red Bull Racing, perhaps?!), it would still struggle to match the intensity on offer when you’re belting through traffic at some unholy speed, praying the next bend won’t hide some timid old lady, edging out into the road to get a clear view.

Critics may argue that there’s a degree of repetition to be found, as reset events are simply replaced with the exact same victory conditions offered before, but the fact remains with an open-world environment some routes will simply offer more entertainment than others, and should therefore be employed to full effect. Besides, this is a game to be nibbled at; one to put down at the end of an hour-long play session joyous and eager for more. To grind away at its charms for more than that time would be like buying a tasty strawberry milkshake before taking it down your nose – an unpleasant and unnecessarily sticky experience.

After being perhaps the Burnout series’ most fervent critic (arguing against the creation of a ‘series’ at all), this reporter has to therefore concede a triumphant return to form. The revamped environment provides ample scope to race honestly or not, removing the need for those just after an old-school ‘avoid the other vehicles’ challenge to indulge in over-elaborate sideshows. Essentially what we’re saying is you can never have too much choice.

And so, the title of ‘Best Game Released In January’ is won, collected, and sped off into the night with screeching tyres. While our lead review proves more of the same is to come this month, you could certainly do far worse than throwing a few of those leftover Christmas pounds and gift card points the way of EA. After all, gaming experiences this fine come along rarely, and are to be enjoyed with a glass of your finest wine at leisure when they do (or, failing that, your fizziest pop). You might even have a ‘smashing’ time. Or maybe ever a ‘cracking’ one. Break a leg, and so on. Whatever embarrassing phrase you choose to use, this is a sparkling return to form for a series pretty much on top anyway…

Dave Shaw