Thursday 10 May 2007

Bizarre Creations’ Project Gotham Racing series for the Xbox was regarded as the premier arcade-style racer on the console, so for the launch of the 360 Microsoft enlisted Bizarre to create another entry in the series to showcase the power of the new console. PGR3 certainly does that – it is most impressive to look at, but it also has some very solid game play to match, and is a must-purchase title for anyone with a 360 and a love for driving games.

Kudos and the Street Racer

From its origins in Metropolis Street Racer for the Dreamcast, this series has been known for arcade-style in-city racing, and more particularly for its kudos system. This system, where a player scores points for performing maneuvers such as power sliding, overtaking, drifting and drafting, is the series’ most engaging and unique feature as this sort of fun driving is more important in the game than winning races. As long as you finish at a certain position in a race (depending on the difficulty you play at), you get to bank the kudos you earned during the race. PGR3 is a bit different to its predecessor in that you earn credits from races as well, and these credits are then used to purchase cars, not the kudos themselves. Instead kudos are mainly used to achieve ranks in the game and to unlock various concept cars, and are the goal in some of the race types.

While I do say PGR3 is about fun arcade-style racing, please be warned that a good degree of skill is required to achieve enjoyable racing results – this is not in the same vein as Ridge Racer or Sega Rally, where skill is not a prerequisite to enjoyment as the game systems are very forgiving; PGR3 is not forgiving at all – the tracks are tight and the cars follow the laws of physics at least somewhat. Driving around at full speed is bound to get you crashing into barriers around every corner, and I have seen many a newcomer become frustrated by this. This is not a slight on the game at all; it is simply the nature of being a hybrid between high realism racing and arcade racing, but I feel I should warn those looking for pure arcade racing.

Limited Environments and Fast Cars

What is perhaps a slight on the game is the lack of variety between tracks. According to the marketers there are literally hundreds of thousands of “tracks” available, and in a sense it’s true if one extra corner a new track makes, but what they don’t explain fully is that there are only five environments to race in. And, what’s more, two of those are not all that full-featured (such as Nurburgring, which is awesome by the way, and Las Vegas). Only the London, New York and Tokyo environments have a significant number of different routes, but even in those locations I still got a sense of déjà vu every time I raced a new route because I had been on just about all the stretches of road before, only not in that particular order. By the last few events I knew what was coming up even on new routes. Fortunately the various Nurburgring courses pop up near the end to offer something completely different. I hope that in the future some more environments show their way into the game, even if they are simpler.

Other than that one complaint, I have no qualms recommending PGR3 – it’s one of the finest racers I’ve played. Some might be upset that there are no Porsches in the game, but I am not particularly interested in the cars themselves so that didn’t bother me. All 80 of the cars seem to be of the super-car variety (in fact one of the criteria for getting your car into the game is that its top speed must be above a certain threshold) so you can’t have a little light fun racing minis around the streets of London. Actually, I lie, you can but it’ll cost you a little more as you’ll have to download the Style Pack from the Xbox Live Marketplace which contains the Mini Cooper. PGR is not for those wanting to race their Polo’s against a friend’s RunX, but it is for the dreamers who want to take their Enzo to the streets of Tokyo. For me, they’re all just different colours and shapes (albeit very pretty and shiny colours and shapes – the graphics are really something), so I pick cars by stats and go. I can’t speak for car fans who like to modify their cars (those who know the difference between an F40 and an F50, and even know that those are made by Ferrari), but as a racing fan I can say that PGR is very solid with good controls, well balanced physics, some really cool camera angles and a fun reward system.

Vast Replay Value

I should mention the large variety of modes in the game. Almost all of them require you to drive as fast as possible and so the variety is a little deceptive. There are some that ask for something a little different, such as earning a certain amount of kudos in a lap or in a time limit. There are five difficulty levels for each race you do – it is a great feature to be able to select the difficulty per race because if you’re struggling on one particular event you can lower the difficulty and continue playing. It is satisfying too to go back to the earlier events and win them on the harder difficulty levels (once you get a faster car of course). There are also the online modes available via Xbox Live Gold where you can race up to seven other players in ranked and unranked games. While the career mode will not take all that long to conquer (around 8 hours on medium for me), completing all those events on the hard and very hard difficulties will take a lot longer and online play offers the chance of getting even more value for your money. As for earning all the badges and achievements… well, kudos to you if you manage that!

PGR is a quality racer which differentiates itself from other racing games enough for me to recommend it highly. I can’t see it being made obsolete by any game on the 360 except perhaps PGR4. It is a must-have title for any racing fan with the 360, and one very good reason to own the console itself.

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Contributor:	Peter

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