Burnout Paradise is not your routine Burnout racing experience. While it maintains a great deal of the intensity the racing series is known for, its new interface makes it almost a completely different game. Either you'll find the city layout invigorating and a bold new step for the series, or you'll think it's an exercise in frustration.

Here's the way it works. You race through the breathtakingly beautiful Paradise City, separated into sections connected together through intertwining streets. Around each corner, you'll find a new challenge. These challenges vary considerably, from routine Races to car-crunching Road Rage events to the exciting Marked Man competitions. You simply need to pull up at a checkpoint for the event, hit the gas and brake buttons at the same time and get ready to race. There are literally hundreds of events scattered throughout the city, so if you don't complete one in the proper time frame, there's always something new to tackle.

The one big problem with this interface, something that's been noted by people who played the demo, is that you can't instantly restart an event. If you lose a race by running out of time or turning your car into Swiss cheese, you must drive all the way back to the beginning to race in it again. Some people may find this to be a real hassle, especially considering the wide-open map presented in Paradise. There are no highlighted routes on the map, so it's difficult to track down where your starting point was. It's easier just getting into another event and coming back to it later.

Aside from this hitch, Paradise is fantastic. The racing action is very intense, with several jumps, crashes and high-speed antics. You'll find yourself using shortcuts, ramming through billboards and turning glossy sports cars into scrap metal. The action holds at a smooth sixty frames per second, not losing any detail. When a car crashes into a guardrail and flips around on the course, the game shifts to a dramatic camera view so you feel its impact. Of course, Criterion's done this before in previous Burnout games, but the destruction of a sports car never looked this beautiful.

Thus far, the game leaves a very good impression. The open world route won't be for everyone, but it is an interesting twist, one that'll leave you roaming the city for hours on end.

Oh, one last thing. To the person who decided to use Guns n' Roses' "Paradise City" as the opening song – pure genius.