Burnout Paradise: Ultimate Box Review

One word: SUCKS!
Allow me to contemplate:
I absolutely loved the first 3 Playstation versions. I almost bought a PS2 just to play burnout. So now that finally a PC version came out you can imagine my excitement. All that went away just minutes after installing and jumping in my first car.

Of course there's no story, no need for one anyway, but the game just dumps you in the middle of a boring city and if you want action you have to drive around to find it.
This was firstly done in Need for Speed Underground and it worked great. It gave the player a sentiment of freedom. BUT in NFS you had stuff to do. You had a linear story, performance upgrades, you could fool around with the looks of your car to customize it in sickening detail, money you earned helped you buy stuff and pay fines, plus you had cop chases.

In BP none of that exists. You don't get BP just to have another clone of NFS, you get it for it's uniqueness. Well that's gone too. That thrill of the race with the boost and the crazy speed and the speed blur? gone. The crash mode from burnout 2? Yup. Gone. The game has nothing that reminds you the first instalments of the series.
At least is it playable? No! The car physics are so dumbed-down that it's more arcade than the arcades. I didn't expect a driving simulator, after all, in the past I didn't enjoy Colin Mcray games because they were too hard. But this, this feels like it's 1995 and I'm playing Sega Rally again.
And what about the menu? It's a nightmare! you have to press F1 & F2 to navigate to various menu categories, with an added delay between each screen just like on a freakin' console. Sometimes keyboard navigation doesn't even work and after you press frantically the enter button several times, you drag the mouse and click the enter button.
The only points that I did like were the graphics, and the car models that get smashed pretty nicely in slow motion. Unfortunatelly those advantages are not strong enough to make me like the game.
Another bad thing is that it doesn't convey the feel of the speed properly. I'm driving flat out with a fast car and it feels like I'm on first gear. The fact that it doesn't have a speedometer doesn't help either. I was fighting my way through the menu to change a setting or something and get a speedometer, and I noticed paradise bikes mode! Another joke! Whoever developed that, never rode a bike in his life!
Yikes! Uninstall, throw the disk away!