Project Gotham Racing 4 Review

So we have now been struck with another of the PGR series and we just have to ask ourselves, as with every sequel, can it be better than the last one? The problem with most sequels is that it doesn’t live up to the expectation of the gamers because it is usually the same old game with a few more unnecessary add-ons. Luckily for us, this is not the case at all with Project Gotham Racing 4.

The career is set in a similar way to PGR3. You start at the bottom rank and slowly have to work your way up to Rank 1 by doing various races in multiple locations, on seemingly endless amounts of tracks. There are two main differences in the career between PGR 3 and 4, however. In 3, you race to win money and with that money you have to purchase the best cars to win the career.

In 4, there is no money within the game. You race for Kudos; you earn these by winning races and doing tricks, for example, handbrake turns or good corners. You can use these to buy a range of things from new helmets for your editable racer, to new cars and tracks. You also never fail, instead you just earn less Kudos. No more getting stuck on unbelievably hard races anymore! But with that said, is this a good or bad thing? Does it leave any challenge to the game? Of course it does, you’ll still want to get the best times, but you can now complete the game without getting stuck half way through!

One of the new perks to this latest installation is that you can customize the design on your car. Oh yes. You can create a design from set templates, move them about and change the colours. This is then saved as your ‘custom design’ setting when picking your cars colour. You can also now create your own racer. Although this is minimal you can still get great pleasure from seeing your creation driving a Ferrari at 150mph.

Along with theclassic race types such as Street Race and Elimination there are a few extra ones; Cat and Mouse, Bulldog and Tourist. In Cat and Mouse you get two teams ofcars: one is ‘D Class’ (usually) and one is ‘A Class’. The D class cars are trying to get round a track as normal against the other D class cars. The A class cars are trying to prevent this as much as possible by smashing andcrashing into them, causing as much havoc as a bull in a china shop.

Bulldog follows the traditional school ground game rules. One car is the ‘Fox’ and is trying to catch the other cars. All other cars, or ‘Hares’, are avoiding getting hit. If a Hare is tagged by a Fox, they join the team of ‘Fox’ and start trying to catch the remaining Hares. This is a very entertaining and time passing experience. 'Tourist' is pretty much as the name explains. You pick your car and drive round checking out the sights of some of the capital cities of the world.

Some of the best parts of PGR3 remain in the game. You can still save all your best replays and take photos during or after racing, and you can still host them on xBox Live so everybody else can see!

Sticking to the subject of xBox Live, a very annoying occurance kept popping up in-game. When your xBox Live status changes (offline to online and vise versa) the game will automatically quit back to the start menu. Something which starts to get more and more annoying.

The amount of cars you available in this game has at least doubled from the last one. There are cars to please everybody: Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Dodge Vipers, Austin Martins - even a Mini Cooper has been thrown in there! Result! The looks of the cars are fantastic. Oh my, the amount of time I spent just looking at these beauties is phenomenal! You now have a few more camera angles that you can choose from as well, just to mix things up a bit.

Who could forget what PGR have prized themselves on in this game? Motorbikes. Yes, motorbikes; speedy little two wheelers whizzing round the track. These do have a differentfeel to them to the car so they are quite hard to handle and can take a little bit of getting used to, but once you have the hang of them they are very fun to ride around.

In my view, Microsoft has excelled on this game. They thought about nearly everything that could have been thought of and tried their best to include it. Project Gotham Racing 4 is definitely one to add to the library.