Project Gotham Racing 4 (Project Gotham Racing 4 (Xbox 360))

Member Name: AndyCreighton

Product:	Project Gotham Racing 4 (Xbox 360)
Date:	23/10/09 (40 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Looks Great, Lasts forever, Lots of different race modes

Disadvantages: Bad music, Only for Racing Fans

I remember the first time I played Project Gotham Racing 4, it was in my friends house a few days after its release. I wasn't really a racing game fan, only dabbling in a little Need For Speed Underground, but I thought I would give it a go nonetheless. After picking my car of choice (BMW M5), I watched my friend tear around the track while I sat comfortably in the bosom of a red and white barrier. Shortly after I insisted he turned it off. That was my first experience of PGR4, but within the 2 years since the game was released I have become, just like Richard Hammond, a 'driving god!'. So I thought I'd pick it up on the cheap and give it another go, and in doing so I discovered that PGR4 is a wonderfully frustrating game.

The point I was trying to make there is that PGR4 is not for the casual racing gamer. The first time I played it I had no knowledge of cars or racing, I couldn't identify a racing line and I didn't know what an apex is. On top of that I had played only a handful of racing games throughout my life, my inexperience led me into thinking this was a bad game, but how I was wrong. PGR4 is a game for petrolheads, fact. You must understand racing to get the most out of the game, otherwise you will probably find it too difficult and possibly even boring.

Alright, so what makes it so hard? First of, the games a simulation, its not an arcade racer, every car in the game reacts the same way it would in the real world, you experience understeer and oversteer, the braking is realistic and the steering is not twitchy. Add that ontop of the insanely hard AI and you have a game for driving game enthusiasts.

So what's so great about PGR4? The answer? Lots, but lets start with the graphics. While the game is a little over 2 years old now, it still looks well. The car models are spot on, the reflections are pretty and the background of the tracks are gorgeous. The cockpit view however, is a bit lacklustre, I suppose back at the time of release it would have looked well, but today its overshadowed by the car interiors and cockpit views of the likes of GRIP and NFS Shift. The sound is well, strange, everything sounds well, whether it's the sound of your turbo charged Evo or the sound of your Elise as the tyres scream as you take that corner maybe a bit faster than you should have, the sound effects are truly wonderful. But the music? Well that's a different story. The score confuses me, one minute I'm listening to some Kaiser Chiefs, the next I seem to be driving to the tunes of what sounds like the theme of a Bollywood rom com, I really didn't know what to think of it, so I decided to turn it off and listen to the sweet sound of my V6.

As usual with racing games, PGR4 comes with its very own career mode. You start with a few cars, and bikes, and you participate in races based on your calendar, although to be honest you don't have much control over your career and I just followed the path the game laid out for me. To access new cars you have to gain and spend Kudos, the games currency. You earn Kudos by winning races, but also by performing certain actions while on the track, burnouts, overtakes, air time, drifts all net you kudos which can be used to unlock car, new clothes for your driver (which you never get to see, so no real point there), you can also unlock new tracks for single and multi-player. The strange thing with PGR4 is that you don't buy cars signally, you have to buy them in packs which can come with a number of cars. This is fine, as it increases your garage quickly, but if you only want one car in the bundle, it can be a bit annoying that you have to buy them all.

The game also comes with no sort of upgrade feature, some games have followed this trend but I find it came really drain the life out of the game. It often happens within these sorts of games that you start out in a car, earn a bit of money and buy a better car to simply forget about your first set of wheels and ruin the relationship you had originally built. But PGR4 almost wants you to do this, throwing a multitude of better cars at you all the time. I suppose this way you wont get bored as you have lots of cars to play with, but it still takes something away from the game that I can't put my finger on.

The nice thing is that there is plenty of variation within the types of races. You have your usual grip races and lap times modes, but you have a little more interesting modes, such as Cone Sprints in which you must navigate a course full of cones, avoiding them at all costs, or Superstar, which is a competition to see which driver can earn the most Kudos in a race. It really helps to increase the lifeline of the game, and also its fun to play. Although at the same time, some can be extremely frustrating, with constant restarts. But the majority of them are fun, and don't come up often enough to be annoying.

Overall, like previously mentioned the game is mainly for players who know what they're doing behind the wheel, if this isn't you, you might want to look else where. Although if your interested in driving simulations and reckon yourself as a bit of a Jensen Button, you might find a place in your heart for PGR4 which will probably remain there for a long, long time.

Summary: Petrolheads dream come true