Regardless of that, there isn't a whole lot of skill involved in the Showtimes, aside from seeing how absurdly long you can keep it going. But the required scores are easy as pie to hit, and since there's no planning or anything involved in what you're doing, it feels like most of the challenge (and thereby fun) of the old Crash modes is gone.

Showtime events are coupled with timed runs for each street. If you head to one of the ends of any road in the game and start driving on it, a counter will begin ticking up that shows you your time. It's a very simple and very natural way of including time trials in the game, and as simple as it is, it works really well.

Stunt events are the freshest addition to the Burnout formula, tasking you to rack up a certain amount of points in a given timeframe. While you'll earn points for sliding around turns and boosting, you'll only earn valuable multipliers for jumping off ramps, crashing through gates or performing a barrel roll, which gives you double goodness. It's a pretty awesome event that'll have you screaming down streets, looking for just one more ramp to hit to help keep your combo alive. The only downside here has to do with the different types of cars you can choose and how they affect a Stunt event's difficulty...

Each of the 70+ cars in the game falls into a certain category, either Stunt, Speed or Aggression. The Aggression vehicles are large and heavy, perfect for Road Rage, but not so much for events that require agility. Cars with the Stunt classification are designed to be good for jumps and drifting, and most resemble the rides that you'll find in past Burnout games. Speed cars specialize in excessive boosting as they allow you to chain together Burnouts to keep your boost going forever, but they have a downside in that you can only start a boost when your meter is full.

Having to wait until your boost meter is full means that the Speed cars are more finicky during races, though the payoff on long straightaways can be greater. But during Stunt events they wind up being terrible picks since a quick tap of the Boost in any other vehicle will immediately extend your combo meter. In a Stunt or Aggression car, you can take a jump for points, cruise for a bit while looking for your next jump, and then tap the boost for just a second when your combo is about to expire to extend it. Not so in the Speed cars. This boosting difference would make more sense if the Speed cars were noticeably faster than the other types, but they're not.

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One pretty cool thing relating to the vehicles in the game is how you earn them. When you get a new license, you'll be rewarded with a new ride in your junkyard for driving immediately. All of the other cars, however, have to be taken down first. When you "unlock" a car after an event, it will then appear somewhere in Paradise City and drive around on its own. In order to fully earn it, you have to find said car and then take it down. Like our approach to event selection, we found this to be best when we didn't bother hunting them down after unlocking them, but instead kept doing our thing while keeping our eyes peeled. Then when a car crossed our path, we'd drop everything and head out with a new ride in our headlights. It's a pretty awesome mechanic that helps instill life into Paradise City.

Perhaps the most well-implemented addition to the franchise is the way that online play works. Instead of having to jump out to a separate menu to get online, invite friends to your game, set up challenges or whatever else, all of this is manageable in-game with the D-Pad. Pressing right on the D-Pad opens up the online menu where you can then hop online, invite friends to your game, set up race events or whatever else you want, all while your engine is still running.

When a friend or two (or seven) hop on, you have a number of options. You can create a custom race where you can set start and end points and drop any number of checkpoints onto the map. You can even save these routes for play later on so that you don't have to keep making them. You can also start a Freeburn Challenge of some sort. There are 50 challenges for each number of players in the game. In other words, there are 50 challenges for two player, 50 different challenges for three players, and so on and so forth, giving you an absolute ton of Freeburn runs to complete (yes, 100% completion will take a long time). These are as simple as having two players race from opposite sides of an open bridge and crashing in mid-air to having every player do a barrel roll through a hoop. They're all good fun and give you tons of different things to do.

Regardless of everything we've talked about, the most important part of any Burnout game, and the reason they've been so successful in the past, is simply how well (and fast) the driving mechanics work. Criterion has nailed the formula once again, offering gamers the pinnacle of arcade racing mechanics with cars that control exactly how you would expect them to, with the perfect amount of inferred weight sent to the player. As well, the sense of speed we've seen in the past is here 110%, with roadside objects blurring by your outside mirrors at uncountable speeds.

Lastly, it's worth mentioning that Criterion has also once again delivered a game that runs incredibly smooth and sounds fantastic. The game runs at a blistering 60fps, which ties perfectly with its controls, and it looks impressive at that. The crash effects are fantastic, slowing down to show you your crumpling wreck as the steering wheel is shoved into the driver's seat. Were there a virtual driver sitting there, he'd be dead.
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