Buy, Borrow, or Bury: Project Gotham Racing 4
Unfortunately I didn’t beat any games this week. I did however, revisit a game that I finished a few months back. I’ve been sucked back into Project Gotham Racing 4 via its multiplayer and so I figured what the heck, I’ll do a throwback edition of Buy, Borrow, or Bury. Project Gotham Racing 4 is the 4th game (surprising, right?) in my favorite racing game franchise – the Project Gotham series. Project Gotham Racing first debuted on the Xbox many moons ago, and since then there have been 3 more games, all Xbox (or Xbox 360) exclusives. PGR4 is basically an arcade-type racing game which encourages the style factor of racing over the simulation games such as Forza or Gran Turismo which encourage realism. I happen to like the arcade racers more myself, if only because I’m not a gear head, so in any game where I have to swap out drive trains or pick better shocks I’m lost. In PGR4 every car is rated, you don’t have to mod anything aside from the paint job, so you can just get out there and race.
Of course the premise to PGR4 is racing with style, and you’re awarded points for pulling off cool moves while on the track. For instance, if you pull off a powerslide around a corner, catch some air, drive at a ridiculously high speed – all of these maneuvers will award you points called kudos. You can chain the moves together to earn a multiplier and get more kudos. There are even specific race types which encourage stylish racing and are based around maintaining a kudos multiplier, but there’s also your standard race types as well. What PGR4 brings to the table that’s new is a set of beautiful locations which you can racing during different times of the day as well as with different weather patterns, new racing modes for both single player and multiplayer, an overhauled multiplayer experience, and finally new vehicles to tool around in including motorcycles.
For single player you get to modes – Career and Arcade. Anyone who’s played the PGR games in the past will instantly recognize Arcade, as its basically what the games were before. You’re broken out into different races and challenges across different locals with different vehicle classes and you have to complete the challenge to move forward and unlock new challenges. You also get a medal for completing a challenge. If you don’t get at least a bronze on a challenge you can’t move forward, and some of the challenges can be a bit frustrating (especially the kudos challenges, for me at least) so you’ll find yourself doing the same challenge over and over. Still though if you liked the old format Arcade mode is for you.
Me? I instantly took to the Career mode. You’re an up and coming racer who’s ranked on an in-game leaderboard, and you play out your career as you try to top the leaderboard at rank 1. There are a ton of different events just like in arcade, but you don’t have to do well in an event to progress. The only punishment for not doing well is that you won’t rank up as fast as you would if you were doing well. Basically, career mode takes the pressure off and just lets the player have fun racing. You make your way all around the world to the many locations in PGR4 across all of the car classes (A – G, G being the lower end cars while Class A contains some super sports cars that blaze the track). Another cool thing about the Career mode is that you’re rewarded by doing well in a particular race circuit by either unlocking a special event or earning a new car to add to your garage. The events are cool little challenges like racing around the longest track in the game – Nurburgring – in a car straight out of the 40’s. Think that’s hard? It’s also winter-time. Ouch. But, if you complete the race in the allotted time you unlock the car you raced in. Basically, the career mode had a lot to it for me. It kept me occupied while the arcade mode was just that, a mode where you can jump in and try out a couple events without investing too much time. It should be noted that Career mode, if you play it all the way to Rank 1, takes roughly 2 to 3 times longer to complete than Arcade mode does.
The multiplayer includes all of the single player events (race types like classic races and eliminator) as well as some new additions like the cat and mouse "chase" mode, bulldog races, and my personal favorite team racing. In team racing a group of racers is split into two or more teams and each racer is rewarded points for their position at the end of the race. These points are accumulated by team and whichever team has the most points win. So, for example, if a driver on the other team takes first but the rest of his team ends up in last place or close there-to, chances are they’ll lose. It adds a completely new element to racing games that you don’t usually associate with them. The cooperative element is really fun. Online racing can also be split up into circuits and championships, where a group of racers race in a series of events to see who gets the best overall ranking throughout the entire slew of events. That’s a game mode that you would typically associate with a single player experience but it transitions into multiplayer beautifully.
Just some other things to note…first off, the game is gorgeous. There’s nothing like screaming down a street in New York City in the rain, it’s absolutely beautiful. A lot of people complained that the graphics weren’t significantly better than the graphics in Project Gotham Racing 3, but I’d have to disagree. PGR3 was a pretty game too, but with the added weather effects and road conditions PGR4 only improves on that. Also, you can save replays of races and watch races live via PGR On Demand (this was also featured in PGR3) but now there’s a whole different out-of-game experience you can have with your saved replays. After you save a replay you can go in and take pictures of the race, and, if you so choose, you can upload these pictures to the Project Gotham website so your friends can see. I think this is a really cool feature, and there’s nothing like grabbing a snapshot of your moment of glory in a particularly brutal race to share. Of course this feature has since been upstaged by Halo 3’s extensive video and image sharing integration, but remember PGR4 came out first. Here are a couple examples of snapshots from my recent races (click to enlarge):
The first two are from the starting line from a race, the third one is us rubbing paint mid-race. I was driving the silver Enzo, and my brother was driving the red Atom 3000 (I think that’s what it’s called). As you might guess the reason I got back into PGR4 is that my brother recently got a 360 as well as PGR4. We’ve played quite a bit the past week and have had a lot of fun. Anyways, the images aren’t bad, right? Pretty good looking if you ask me, and that’s all in-game stuff from a race, no cinematics. Of course those are just my amateur shots that I made real quick, but you can also look at the highest rated images taken in PGR4 in-game and there’s some way cooler stuff there.
I have to say that, unless you hate racing games, you should buy PGR4. Is that the first time I’ve given a game a ‘buy’ recommendation? I think so. In any case PGR4 deserves it – and as far as I know it’s your last chance to try out Project Gotham because it’s the last game in the series unfortunately. As always you can leave feedback if you agree, disagree, or just want to discuss something via the comments or my email address which can be found here. Thanks for reading!
Oh, and using the handbrake to slow down in PGR4 is NOT recommended. =P
