With Project Gotham Racing 4 however, Bizarre Creations have delivered something far more substantial. For starters, the game has now essentially been split into two main sections. Within the Arcade Mode you’ll find pretty much what you would expect to find from a PGR game - various events under the medal structure. For those unfamiliar with series, PGR’s events are rarely just a simple race to the finish line. The whole game is built around the idea of earning ‘kudos’. These are essentially points that are awarded for driving with style as well as speed. Things like handbrake turns and long powerslides will rack up the points in no time. Speed is also rewarded more now too, with points given for taking corners properly on the correct racing line or achieving and maintaining a high speed.
The existence of the kudos system in PGR takes the focus away from simply coming first and opens up ideas for a variety of events. There are pure kudos-based challenges like ‘Superstar’ where the idea is simply to rack up as many kudos points as possible within a time limit and a set number of laps. The ‘Time Vs Kudos’ events is essentially a time trial event with a kudos flavour to proceedings. You see, every time you score points the timer briefly stops, so balancing your high speed racing with some stylish driving is the only way to get over the finish line in time.
Cone challenges test your ability to follow a driving line. Whether it’s meandering through a series of tightly set out gates as fast as you can or smashing into rows of cones trying to knock over as many as possible, they’re always a joy to play. There are also a great selection of more traditional ‘go as fast as you can’ events too such as ‘One on One’, ‘Hot Lap’, ‘Overtake’ and ‘Street Race’ need no explanation. ‘Eliminator’ mixes things up by ejecting the racer in last place every 30 seconds, while ‘Breakthrough’ has you hurtling through a series of checkpoints before the timer runs out, much like in old arcade classics such as Ridge Racer or OutRun.
It rains in Vegas?
The career mode however does things a little differently. Whereas the medal system in Arcade mode promotes the idea of retrying events over and over to overcome them, the annual calendar setup of career mode throws events at you with just the task of beating them to worry about. These events are essentially the same kind of thing you get in the Arcade mode, except for that only get one chance at them and they usually come as a series of challenges with points awarded depending on your performance. Although in career you’re often directly competing against others a lot more it is still kudos that’s needed for championship points to be awarded with.
The decision to split the game in this way is probably the best thing Bizarre Creations could have done with the PGR series. The new Career setup, while maintaining a lot of what has made PGR great, will please players who simply disliked the repetitive nature of the medal system. But by keeping the medal system intact of the Arcade portion of the game will keep long term fans more than happy - especially considering how much better the medal quotas in PGR4 are over the previous game. Platinum’s were a little too easy to come by in PGR3 compared to the previous games, but thankfully they offer a much stiffer challenge here.
The inclusion of bikes into the series for the first time is something that has been met with a lot of skepticism. The fear was that they wouldn’t fit the style of the game or handle with the same degree of satisfaction that the cars do. At first it’s hard not to agree with those same fears as you hit the walls for the twelfth time during the first lap. But give them time and learn how you’re supposed to ride them, because once it ‘clicks’ they’re great fun to ride around on and offer something fresh to the game, especially in Arcade mode where there are medals specifically for bikes as well as cars.
As well as the revamped and beefed up single player campaign, PGR4 manages to double the amount of cities. The existing cities of London, Las Vegas, Tokyo and New York make a return (complete with new routes) but it’s the new cities that provide the biggest reason to get excited about. For those who felt the cities PGR3 were a little on the flat side, the steep hills and winding hairpins of Quebec should satisfy, as should St Petersburg which is packed full of sharp hills and sneaky hump bridges that’ll launch you in the air at high speeds. Shanghai is a little too similar to Tokyo for our tastes, but the sweeping curves and the tight, narrow streets of Macau more than make up for things.
In car view + rain = wow
One of the most surprisingly great additions to PGR3 was the inclusion of the Photo Mode which thankfully makes a welcome return here too. Just as before, you can pause the game at any time (or during a replay) and the screen is transformed into a camera lens, complete with all sorts of focus, colour and blurring effects to play around with in order to get the best shots. Thanks to the ‘PGR On Demand’ section, photos actually have a bigger role now. Replacing the ‘Gotham TV’ of PGR3, ‘PGR On Demand’ allows up to upload your photos and videos to share with the world. Not only can you download replays and snaps from anyone, you can also vote on them too so the best creations out there get noticed. As a nice touch you can even hang photos in your virtual garage. Like PGR3 there's an accompanying website (http://www.pgrnations.com) where you can access your photos on your PC and share them with the world further. In fact, the screenshots for this very review have been obtained this very way.
Ever since Metropolis Street Racer hit the Dreamcast all those years ago, stunning visuals have been a trademark of the series, and it’s of little surprise that PGR4 is absolutely gorgeous. On a technical level it impresses, with sharp textures, thousands of polygons thrown into the car models and far less jaggies than were present in PGR3. But it’s the subject matter that is really what makes the game look as good as it does.
Track based games like Forza 2 or F1 Championship (PS3) just can’t match up to the likes of London’s streets, Las Vegas’s neon-lit highway or Quebec’s interesting architecture. Throw in the stunning weather effects like rain and snow, with storm and fog based variants, view it all from amazingly detailed in-car cockpit camera with rain bouncing off the windscreen (complete with active wipers) and no racing game comes close to matching PGR4’s beauty. The fact that we can rarely finish an event without seeing at least something that could make for a good photo and then pausing the game to play around with the camera lens for 5mins is a testament to how good things look.
You can't beat a nice shiny Enzo...
Sound is something that is often overlooked in racing games. With custom soundtracks supported on the 360 there’s never any need to suffer the on-disc music, although there’s a varied selection of bearable tunes from well known artists here should you so wish to listen to them. The accuracy of the audio positioning in PGR3 was practically flawless and things are just as good here too. Without even looking in your mirror it’s entirely possible to hear which side a passing car is on and its distance from you. Even more impressive is how sounds even reverberate off the buildings when you’re racing through the narrower streets of the game. Just take the almost silent, electric powered, Tesla for a spin around St Petersburg if you really want to appreciate it.
Online multiplayer is a standard requirement these days and PGR4 doesn’t disappoint in this respect either. Using a party system incredibly similar to Halo’s, getting people together and races up and running has never been easier. The online play itself is every bit as smooth as you could hope for. Even with players from overseas there’s rarely ever any sign of lag, even with a room full of 8 players. One criticism of PGR3 being played online was how easy it was to spin out opposing racers with only just the slightest of touches. Here things do seem to have improved somewhat and although soft spin-outs still happen more than they should do there does seem to have been a conscious improvement by the developers to prevent it.
It’s hard to fault PGR4 in any major way. The biggest issue some may have with it is how similar to PGR3 it essentially is, but is that a fault in a racing game that doubles its tracks, includes bikes and vastly increases the size of its single player campaign? Project Gotham Racing 4 really is the whole package this time around. The new cities are fantastic; the handling model still hits that perfect balance between fantasy and realism and the sheer amount of things to do, plus its online multiplayer means you be playing it for a long time to come. In addition, those long reload times you had to endure in PGR3 whenever retrying an event have been cut to well under 10 seconds, so even loading is dealt with better here. In case you were wondering about it, we’ve not even made mention of Geometry Wars: Waves as it deserves more than a short paragraph squeezed into this review but needless to say it’s just as great as we’d hoped. With Bizarre Creations now under Activision’s wing, Microsoft have a tough job ahead of them finding a developer to better this.
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