This title showed its face on several release lists over the past few months, but an official announcement wasn’t available until now. Burnout 5 will offer the player more freedom to wreak havoc in the new Paradise City. The engine for this game is built from scratch to deliver true next generation graphics and gameplay.

There’s no intel on the game modes or online features but the press release was pretty adament about giving the player more freedom. It explicitly stated that there’s no need to pick your races via menus anymore. A huge world like you’ve seen in the recent Need For Speed games will allow you to enter races you encounter along the way instead of working your way through them in a set order.

Burnout 5 gives players license to wreak havoc in Paradise City, the ultimate seamless racing battleground, with a massive infrastructure of traffic-heavy roads to abuse. Gone is the need to jump in and out of menus and aimlessly search for fun like many open world games; in Burnout 5, every inch of the world is built to deliver heart-stopping Burnout-style gameplay. Every intersection is a potential crash junction and every alleyway is an opportunity to rack up moving violations.

Of course, rules are made to be broken, and when gamers enter Paradise City, they’re assigned a Drivers License that quickly begins to amass a record of player’s most aggressive, reckless and destructive exploits behind the wheel. But it’s not the law that’s eyeing player’s progress … when gamers push things too hard they’ll be squaring off against the city’s most infamous burners, and these legends aren’t interested in who crosses the finish line first.

“Burnout 5 is a complete reinvention of the series, built from the ground up for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360,” said Alex Ward, director of game design at Criterion Games. “To create truly next-generation gameplay, we needed to create a truly next-generation game, from top to bottom.”

Burnout 5 also delivers the next level of speed and destruction, with brand new next-generation technology allowing gamers to literally rip their cars in half, in the most explosive pile-ups in the series’ history.

Burnout 5 is being developed by Criterion under EA’s flag just like the 2 previous ones. The game’s set to come out somewhere in 2007.