In Burnout Paradise, you can end an event at any time by stopping your car. Did you know that? I didn’t bloody know that. Possibly it’s in the manual, but that’s not the point: the point is that I played Burnout Paradise for twelve hours without ever discovering what happens when a car’s wheels stop spinning. This, brilliantly, is a game specifically designed to inundate you with a constant flow of vehicle-based insanity, and I never had time to stop.

Burnout Paradise is essentially all the driving from GTA, ripped out, made faster and more vicious, and then plonked into a sprawling utopia of ramps and things to break. You have five events, which can be activated at every crossroads in the city: straight up races to a specific point on the map; Road Rage, in which you smash people up; Marked Man, where you avoid people smashing you up; jumping off ramps and doing handbrake turns in Stunt Run; and car-specific time trials called, for some reason, Burning Routes. None of the events have prescribed routes, which is great if you know all kinds of fancy shortcuts – and when you skip out a huge loop of road by jumping off the roof of a building and over a ravine it is pretty awesome – but terrible if you don’t know the layout of Paradise City initmately. I ended up spending most of my time peering intently at the minimap, until I inevitably ploughed into a Gillette-branded van coming in the opposite direction. This triggers an unavoidable, unskippable, occasionally impressive but all-too-often boring crash sequence where you get to watch your car tumble about a bit trailing shrapnel, with all of your competitors flying past in the background. This, believe it or not, is kind of annoying.

The events are only important in that they let you unlock more cars, though. The real pleasure of Burnout Paradise is racing at breakneck speed around a huge, beautiful city for no particular reason: doing barrel rolls off ramps at the beach, jumping off the roof of a carpark to smash into a bright red billboard, seeing how spectacular a crash you can create. It’s fortunate, then, that the multiplayer lets you do just that. Paradise City is a playground, and therefore goes from entertaining to utterly intoxicating in the always-pleasurable company of random strangers from the Internet. All the events from the single-player are present and correct, save Burning Route,  but better still is the inclusion of hundreds of challenges, tailored to the number of players you have, ranging from ‘Use your boost’ to ‘Jump off the broken bridge and crash into each other in mid air’. It’s entertaining simply by virtue of how completely pointless is it is: there are, probably, achievements tied to the challenges, but there is no in-game gain from doing any of them. Awesomely, it’s just a laugh.

San Andreas has long been my go-to game of choice for when I just need to cruise around listening to music; and while Paradise City never feels as well realised or alive as Rockstar’s masterful creation, it has managed to usurp it for a single simple reason: enthusiasm. This is a game that is in love with driving ludicrously quickly and crashing into things, and even someone as utterly apathetic towards cars and driving games as I can’t help but be caught up by the sheer breathless excitement of it all. Smash this! Beat this time! Take this guy down! Jump off this! Your friend’s just come online! I have now played Burnout Paradise for much longer than that first twelve hours, and not once have I thought: what shall I do now? You start your engine, the game gathers momentum, and then you never stop. The forced-slow-motion crash mechanic is sometimes completely infuriating, but at the very least it dumps you straight back onto the road with your engine running, rather than making you spend ten minutes trying to extricate yourself from a bollard; being forced to stop would be much, much worse. Burnout Paradise isn’t perfect, but it’s brightly coloured and fast and constantly trying to please, and it’s hard not to find its giddy enthusiasm infectious.

(this has been an attempt at writing a slightly more ‘reviewy’ review. Let me know what you think)