Now Playing: Burnout Paradise - The Ultimate Box

I'm not very good at driving games, and I wouldn't say it's a favorite genre of mine. But every now and then, I like to be hurtling down roads at breakneck speeds and feeling like Vin Diesel in Too Fast, Too Furious. Or at least I imagine he feels good.

The last proper racing game I played through was Need for Speed: Most Wanted, and to me that was a revolutionary game. Highly accessible even for non-racing gamers like me, set in an open-world, it wasn't all about going from one race to another, and cop chases were kickass.

Before arriving at Burnout Paradise, I gave Race Driver: Grid a try. It was slated by many as the best driving game for 2008 so I thought I'd be in for a good time from the get-go. I was horribly wrong. I don't know if I was doing something wrong, but the default keyboard configuration made the steering too hyper-sensitive. Just a tap left and the car goes veering out of control and into a wall. I don't think that's how the game is meant to start. I have a feeling other game reviewers played it with a controller or a steering wheel.

Anyway, I had a horrible time just getting the car to get very far without crashing into anything. But from what I could see, the graphics were really awesome and even a bit too much for my laptop to handle. So I uninstalled it and tried Burnout instead.

Now, this game is well-optimized to run on PCs. The graphics are beautiful, the cars are shiny and show a lot of detail when banged up. The massive city environment is well detailed and the draw distance is good. And no lag.

As a racing game though, it seems a lot more simplistic than even Need for Speed. You get a car, you drive around the city till you find races to do. Do them, you get rewarded with new cars and upgrade your license to harder challenges. There's no monetary rewards, and no way it seems to upgrade your current cars. Like NFS: Most Wanted (I didn't play Undercover yet), the city are devoid of people, just traffic. I guess if I wanted to run over civilians I should really be playing a game like GTA IV instead.

The racing is great though. There is a definite sense of speed and races are mostly quite simple to complete. The only challenge I see so far is if you crash a lot and then screw up your lead against other racers. Oh and when you crash, you go into a stylish crash-cam where you see your car break in slow-mo. That's always fun. It is also fun that the game has a whole slew of rock and grunge tracks to race to, from Depeche Mode to Killswitch Engage. Blood-pumping stuff.

And it is not all straightforward races. There are other types like marked man where you have to escape from being taken down by other racers, or Take Down where you have to actively try to crash other cars.

So far so good. There are also motorbikes, but I have yet to try that.