Project Gotham Racing 3 Review

Project Gotham Racing stood in the shadow of Halo at the launch of the original Xbox, but it still enjoyed considerable critical and commercial success. The arcade racer with a semi-realistic slant (that had first been seen in Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast) had its detractors – claiming the series was dull – but it spurned a sequel (PGR2) in 2003, and another two years later Bizarre and Microsoft have delivered the third game in the series. This time as a launch title for the Xbox 360 and with no Halo in sight, it’s the shining light of the launch line-up.

If you’ve ever played a PGR game in the past you’ll know what to expect here. You take part in a number of challenges based around driving fast and driving with style. Driving with style earns you Kudos, which in turn increases your Kudos rank, which in turn earns you game credits, which, when added to credits earned by completing races and time trial type challenges, can be used to buy cars. While PGR3 adds some new challenge types, the biggest change is in the structure of the Career mode.

Unlike in the previous games, there aren’t any slow cars in PGR3 and the best the game has to offer can be bought within a few hours of play. Fans of PGR2’s progression system may well be put off by the instant access to some of the world’s finest cars, but being able to play through the entire game with a car you love to drive isn’t too bad. The focus is now on building up your collection of cars that you have taking pride of place in a glorious sun-drenched garage. While nothing more than a way to show off the game’s stunning HDR lighting (realistically modelling how your eyes react to light), you can wander around and even play a few games of Geometry Wars (the old version is as it was in PGR2, while the new version is a demo of what can be bought on the Xbox Live Marketplace and is stunning in its own right).

Car gazing out of the way, the actual racing is as great as it’s always been. If anything, the fact that you no longer have to spend large chunks of the game driving marginally supped up road cars makes the whole experience all the more fun, but if you liked the plodding early races from PGR2, there’s none of that to be found here. The game is split into 23 Championship Series events and each contains a number of challenges. These challenges are made up of four timed events, three racing events and four style events. So, in one Championship Series event you might have to complete a lap within a set time, beat an AI opponent in a one on one race and overtake a set number of cars within a time limit.

As in previous games you must chose the difficulty of the challenge, with medals from steel to platinum representing how tough the challenge will be. The credits you’ll earn are directly linked the difficulty, but seeing as you can earn enough to buy most cars by simply playing on moderate difficulty, the harder settings are there more for anyone who wants to push themselves to the limit. Most of these challenges have been seen before in PGR2, but the Time vs. Kudos challenge and Drift Challenge are new. Time vs. Kudos is probably the hardest type of challenge in the game, giving you a short time in which to navigate a circuit. The twist is that earning Kudos will stop the clock, and this is vital to complete the circuit. The Drift Challenges simply task you with earning a set number of Kudos points by drifting in a short section of track.

The great thing about PGR3 is that almost all of these challenges are great fun. The core driving model is so perfect (as far as slightly realistic, but heavily drifting focussed games go) that whatever you’re doing, it just feels superb. That is, apart from Cone Challenges. I’m sure some people out there must love these as this isn’t their first appearance, but they just don’t fit with the rest of the game, and are particularly unsuitable for such fast cars. Had these been dropped the Career mode in PGR 3 could well have been near perfect. As it is, it’s just damn good.

Near perfect I say? Well, yes. The challenges are only as good as the courses you race in, and sadly, they’re not all brilliant. Set in New York, Las Vegas, London, Tokyo and the Nurburgring, there are some real stunners, but these cities simply don’t offer the thrilling courses that PGR2 had. While longer straights and wider corners are no doubt more suited to the super cars you’re racing, screaming through the tight city streets of Edinburgh and Florence in PGR2 was an exhilarating videogame experience. What’s on offer here still works well, particularly as it all looks so utterly wonderful, but it just lacks the magic of some of the better tracks in PGR2.

Being the successor to one of the most feature complete online games ever, PGR3 sure had its work cut out in the online arena, but it doesn’t disappoint. The online rankings and ghosts are even more embedded into the experience, and Bizarre have added extra trimmings like a news ticker that gives updates on who is doing what in the world of PGR3. However, the real crowning glory of the whole online experience (and we haven’t even got to competitive racing yet) is Gotham TV. Here you can watch what other people are doing online. The Heroes channel broadcasts races featuring the best PGR3 players, while the Friends channel lets you sit back and see what your Xbox Live friends are doing.

The online racing is superb too, with the Online Career mode tracking every one of your ranked races. Online races support up to eight players and you’re matched up with players who are using similar internet connection speeds and are of a similar skill level to you. Lag was minimal too, with problems only arising on a very small number of occasions. Online you have three race types to choose from: Street race, eliminator, and capture the track. Street race and Eliminator are standard modes from the single-player game and can also be played in teams, but capture the track is unique to multiplayer. As a team you must try and hold more of the track than your opponents. To do this you must set the fastest time for a section of track. It’s a great team-based mode and provides plenty of close online matches.

Being a launch title for the Xbox 360 the visuals are going to be under the microscope and no matter how hard you look, PGR3 is a stunning game. Car models are all superb, lighting is glorious (although some tracks tend to look a little dark in places), the frame rate is smooth and the sense of speed is incredible. This is helped by the awesome motion blur that kicks in as soon as your car moves, and pushes the game past good looking, into “OMG” territory. If you look close you’ll see the odd blurry texture and the occasional bit of pop up in the distance, but it’s just nitpicking. On a HD display it simply looks phenomenal, and, despite internet mumblings to the contrary, it looks damn good on a standard definition TV too.

Even when you’re screaming along at 200 mph it’s hard not to notice the incredible audio. All cars sound suitably meaty and the included soundtrack mixes contemporary tunes with some classical music, quite literally providing something for everyone. Of course, you can chose to listen to your own music if you like, with the game displaying each track’s title and artist on screen just as it does with the included tunes. Given the detail that’s gone into all other parts of the game it’s no surprise that each of the racing views have their own sound setup, but the way it’s done is very impressive indeed.

I haven’t even talked about the route creator that lets you race online with friends on the tracks you’ve created, or the in-car view that has to be seen to be believed, or how there’s a crowd around the track that reacts as you smash into barriers. I could have moaned about the relatively poor work that’s gone into making crashes look realistic (hit a wall head on and you’ll just stop, nothing more) or how there’s still no penalty for smashing into other drivers (other than losing your Kudos multiplier), but it would have been trivial. Project Gotham Racing 3 is a stunning game and a truly next-gen package. The fact that there will be better to come is very exciting indeed.