Racing from point A to point B, while exhilarating under the proper conditions, gets a little old after awhile. Eventually developers clued in to the fact that if they wanted to entice gamers and separate their racing games from the rest of the pack, they would have to spice up their pure contests of speed with one or two complementary gameplay mechanics. In the time since that industry-wide revelation, gamers have been treated to racing games with popular mascots, racing games that offer weapons to shoot at the opposition, racing games that are packed with downright excessive amounts of after-market customization options, and racing games that place destruction of property on an equal pedestal to a first place finish. Every racing game these days needs a hook, and for Bizarre Creation’s Project Gotham Racing franchise, the hook is style. It’s been a pretty effective hook thus far too – all three PGR titles have been great efforts and commercially successful to boot, but after years of following the exact same gameplay model, PGR’s hook is getting pretty rusty and PGR4 doesn’t add enough to reinvigorate the series.
The Kudos system is back, and players must balance winning – you know, getting from point A to point B as fast as possible – with looking stylish on the track in order to earn the units of respect that act as in-game currency. The Kudos system has always been a controversial gameplay device among racing fans, as driving with flair by the game’s standard has always run counter to cutting the best lines through the corners and finishing with the fastest times. In the first PGR, this system was posed as a risk-vs-reward proposition, wherein players could choose to make a smooth line through a turn and keep their speed up or go for style and rack up some extra money. Since the second game, Kudos has become less of an option and more of a demand, as there’s simply no way to earn enough currency to progress through the game without opting to drive like a madman. The Kudos system has undergone a few refinements in PGR4 that make traditional driving strategies a more feasible option. Drafting behind other racers, completing sections of the track without any collisions, hitting the apex of a turn and achieving the fastest lap in a race all pay out more Kudos than in previous PGR titles. Playing for speed still won’t garner as much Kudos as fast as playing for style, but the improvements to the Kudos system are a nice compromise for racing purists.
Anyone that has played one of the previous PGR titles will feel immediately at home with the game. PGR has always walked the fine line between arcade and simulation racers, something of a mid-way point between the real-world physics of Forza Motorsport and the over-the-top speed in Burnout. Bizarre Creations has wisely left the boring lower-end cars to games like Forza Motorsport 2 that offer up the customization and tuning options necessary to actually make such cars fun to drive – PGR4, like its predecessors is exclusively 170mph and up. The track designs are far more varied and interesting than the boring official tracks found in simulation racers – these courses cover the globe from the countryside of Quebec to the Metropolises of Asia, and are filled with varied, uneven terrain. Hills to ascend, steep drop offs to catch air off of, and long drifting turns and hair-pin corners, even street-side architecture to drive through. The physics lean toward the arcade end of the spectrum, which makes techniques like drifting and e-brake turning relatively easy to pull off. That said, all of the vehicles are based on their real-world counterparts and the differences between each vehicle have a tangible impact on the way they feel going around the track. Luckily the controls are as tight as we’ve come to expect from PGR, and it doesn’t take more than a lap in a new car to get a feel for the new machine’s performance quirks. PGR4 builds on this strong foundation by adding dynamic weather effects and motorcycles into the mix, with admirable results.
The roster of two-wheeled rockets is equal to if not better than of their four-wheeled cousins. Obviously the three most recognizable brands – Kawasaki, Yamaha and Suzuki – are all well accounted for, but so are the likes of Ducati and Augusta. Crotch-rockets aren’t the only order of the day either, as the inclusion of Harley Davidson should certainly prove. Since PGR4 walks the line between simulation and arcade racer, the motorcycles work accordingly, with only one decelerator button handling both the front and rear brakes. Having one brake button certainly makes the bikes easier to manage, but the bikes seem to have lost something intangible in the process as compared with the bikes in the Moto GP franchise. The missing element is difficult to define, but leaning through turns felt more natural and exhilarating in Climax Studios’ series than they do here, even when juggling two brake buttons and a slower sensation of speed. On the upside, weaving through a pack of exotic cars on a crotch-rocket, popping wheelies and endos for extra kudos on the straight-aways and pumping your fist to piss off the competition never gets old. If we have one issue with the motorcycle, it comes to balance. They’re quick, they chew up kudos faster than any car in the game, but most annoyingly, they’re damn near impossible to tip over. When a driver sees an obnoxious biker pumping his fist in the air as they try to pass, the first instinct is obviously to side-swipe that sucker. Unfortunately, doing so will have no effect short of the extra tire friction slowing the car down. One of the most exciting prospects of the inclusion of motorcycles was the idea of cat and mouse games between drivers of each vehicle type, but what fun is cat-and-mouse if the cat can’t even hurt the mouse? Talk about an emasculated cat.
Luckily Bizarre’s second major addition to the franchise helps those pesky little motorcycles from becoming too overpowered. If you’ve ever wondered why you don’t see too many motorcycles out during the winter there’s a good reason…well, two good reasons. First, it’s cold as hell out there! Second, motorcycles are insanely difficult to control in slippery conditions. Of course, Ferrari’s and the like weren’t exactly built for the snow either, but that’s a minor technicality in the not-quite-reality of Project Gotham Racing. Weather conditions are obviously nothing new in racing games, but PGR4 is the first to offer weather patterns that change over the course of the race, with effects that actually impact the racing experience. There are ten different types of weather, from oppressive sun through to blizzards, and the conditions can and do change over the course of a race. Clear skies can get foggy, severely reducing visibility and turning once relaxing sweeping turns into a tense, claustrophobic race track. Those low clouds can then open up, unleashing torrents of rain that bead and run down the windshield, over the car, and splash up from the tires in unbelievably convincing fashion. Of course, that rain is also forming puddles on the ground, slicking up tires and making drifting a little easier than it needed to be. As puddles continue to form around the track, players will have to beware of the big ones lest they hydroplane out of control coming through a bend. The weather changes a little too fast to be realistic and the effects are obviously exaggerated to make sure players notice, but the visual and mechanical impact on the game is so compelling, even die-hard racing purists wont care to complain. It’s not a series rebirth by any means, but it is a feature that should and will be ‘borrowed’ by other racing game developers.
Bizarre Creations overhauled the entire career mode for PGR4 and the results are less than stellar. The difficulty curve is the biggest offender. In the early stages of the game players will shoot up the rankings with little effort, but by the end of the game they’ll have to seek out the most difficult medal and come out on top in order to progress. The freedom to play the game at one’s own pace that was there in PGR3 is all but gone, but that’s hardly the only problem. Ostensibly designed to mimic the experience of rising through the ranks of a real racing club, the new career mode works on a calendar system that keeps events closed until you reach the date of the race. In order to unlock events, players have to play through each of the events that fall before the event they actually care about on the calendar. They can opt to skip events, but doing so closes the event for the remainder of the calendar year, and that’s a lot of potential Kudos points to give up on. Furthermore, the game autosaves progress immediately after every race, so players are stuck with a lackluster performance on their record until the next season. If you’re a perfectionist like me, and don’t mind restarting a race before completion to do better, then this wont be too big an annoyance. If you just want to play the damn game and come back to a previous race when you feel like it, you will want to snap the game disk in half.
Considering the jump from PGR’s online setup – it had none – to PGR2, which was the first real indication of what Live would become, to PGR3, which was the first show of the Xbox 360 feature-set in a racing game, the jump to PGR4 feels middling. Gotham TV has been updated to ‘Gotham On Demand’ and players can now actively search for specific clips according to criteria like car-type, race-type, time, or Kudos points earned in addition to uploading their own photos and replays. These features are a step forward, but with Bungie offering editable video and direct file-sharing and Turn10 offering a fully featured auction house, you’d think Microsoft would have tried to leverage the advantage of the Microsoft Game Studios banner to try and get these companies talking and give Bizarre Creations a bit more in terms of web integration and the like. Still, even if we are wishing for more ways to interact and share our experiences with all the other Xbox 360 owners taking a break from Halo 3 for some stylish racing, the actual online performance was top notch. Game modes like elimination, cat-and-mouse, bull-dog and their team variants complement traditional race modes and are a great deal of fun with friends. It’s the best online PGR experience yet, but not by much.
Project Gotham Racing 4 feels like an update to Project Gotham Racing 3 more so than a full-fledged sequel. The underlying gameplay mechanics have been refined to a science, but the features on top of that core either don’t do enough to shake things up – like the motorcycles and weather, or have actually hurt the experience – such as the changes to the career mode. Fans of the franchise should absolutely buy this game without a second’s thought, as it’s pretty much the best – and possibly last – PGR ever made. Those who were once fans of the franchise but have grown tired of the fundamental gameplay mechanics won’t find much here to drag them back into the PGR community, and those racing fans that have never quite got caught the Kudos hook are probably better served to save some money and rent the game to see what they think of the Bizarre Creations’ style.
