Project Gotham Racing 3, the sequel to my favourite game on Xbox. An easy ten out of ten then? Erm, no, unfortunately not. The problem with making outstanding, review-score shattering videogames is that when you come to make the sequel, you not only have to match the original game in quality, but gamers expect it to be better than the last game too. I find it hard to say, but Project Gotham Racing 3 fails on both counts. Beyond the High Definition ultra high quality graphics (you have to see the cars in the walk-around garage mode to truly appreciate how good it looks) and unmatched audio, you have a very cut down game from what we had two years ago. I appreciate that deadlines, especially for a launch game are very tight, but PGR3 is seriously lacking game content in certain areas.
The Solo Offline Career is very short, silver (medium) level consisting of about 7 or 8 hours worth of Hot Laps, Cone Challenges, Street Races and two new events: Drifting, and Time VS Kudos. You start with a chunk of cash, and are able to buy from a selection of very quick cars such as Nissan Skylines, and Honda NSX’s. After each event you win prize money which varies depending on what difficulty level you chose, and you also get Kudos which goes towards your overall ranking (starting at 10, working down up 1). You can very quickly get enough money to be able to buy Ferraris, Lamborghinis, or of course the McLaren F1 LM.
This is all very well and good, and I personally found the non-appearance of Jeeps and VW Golfs in the game pleasing, but I feel the game lacks any proper structure and feeling of progression. This is even more evident when you go to play the game online, where virtually every car in the game is available from the start. There are a few cars here and there that need unlocking in offline play, but the majority of the cars, including the previously mentioned McLaren F1 are available without having to ever play offline. In Project Gotham Racing 2 when you had cars like that, it meant you had played through the offline mode, and players knew that if you were driving a Porsche 911 GT1, it meant you had finished the game with Silver Medals. Now any player can drive one of the fastest cars on the planet, and in some cases definitely won’t be skilled enough to handle it. The game is supposedly now being much more accessible to gamers who want cool cars straight away, but what about all the people who spent £40 on PGR2 (and £45 or more on this title), and want a bit of a challenge in the game? There is nothing like that now, and it’s a real shame. Bizarre Creations would argue that you have an all new Online Career mode to play through to show how good you are, but that is bleeding with problems and lack of options...
The main issue being that you cannot play Online Career mode with the friends that you have made over the last three years on Xbox Live. You instead are forced to play with total strangers, a lot of who would rather use the game’s questionable collision detection to spin you off the track and laugh at your plight rather than race fairly and talk about the offline mode where they just unlocked the TVR Cerbera Speed 12 (which you can get after about 3 hours of play now by the way). There is a severe lack of options and race types to play, and you’ll never knew how close that really close race was you just had because the developer has removed lap times and race times from the game – now this decision I really cannot understand – why wouldn’t players want to know their lap times or how much they’d won a race by? It’s a racing game! Beyond this, you can’t see what player is in front or behind you (just the split time), and you are unable to see who is talking either now. These are features we had in the game two years ago, why have they been removed? However, one of PGR3’s great new features is that you can now save online race replays, both in Online Career mode and the more casual, non-rated Playtime mode, and can now review those great races and great passing manoeuvres, or find out who put you in the wall (or of course see how you put someone in the wall).
Beyond these problems, PGR3 really is a very good game. The cars’ handling has been tweaked nicely since the last game, and the balance between realism and enjoyable physics is still very much here, and it’s so very welcome. The game is a delight to play, and when you switch to the new in-car viewpoint the game turns into something you have never experienced before in a video game. The sense of speed is amazing, and the camera sway (to simulate head movement) gives an incredibly realistic sensation of weight shift; you really feel like you’re inside a 200mph car, screaming along a city street. Your car gets thrown around by undulations in the tarmac, and some cars are so powerful that you really have to fight with them to keep them heading in the right direction. I have experienced this sensation in the past by using a force feedback wheel, but never with a standard game controller – it’s truly superb. By using the right analog stick, you can move the camera view to look around the car (virtual cockpit-style), allowing you to look out of the windows to see cars next to you, or to look into the fully working wing and rear view mirrors. Speedometers, rev counters and turbo gauges all work, and the detail of the interiors is outstanding. Switch gear is all modelled, you can see the stitching on the leather and windows even get dust on them, and reflect headlights from trailing cars.
The detail in the cities is phenomenal, with texturing quality you have simply never seen before in a game. Take-Away restaurants through Tokyo and New York City have menus with readable text, and you can clearly see each and every brick of the building. In Las Vegas you can see all the crazy attractions throughout the main strip, with bright neon lights drowning the streets with every colour you can think of. The fully modelled 3D spectators are very varied, and will shy out of the way if you drive your car into the armco barrier near them. They love taking photos too, and you’ll see constant flashing of cameras as you thunder past them through the game’s five locations; London, New York, Tokyo, Las Vegas and Nurburgring. The game uses very clever blurring techniques to give the player a very realistic sense of speed, and it works very well too, and gives the game a much smoother appearance than PGR2, even if it’s still running at 30fps. One of Xbox 360’s main features is that all games can be displayed in 720p high definition, and PGR3 really does look outstanding when being played like this. Everything is so much clearer, cleaner and smoother, and you get to see how much detail that is lost or blurred out when running in standard mode. The game of course also looks incredible on a normal TV too, so fears that “it looks like PGR2 but a bit better” can be banished.
If you have played Gran Turismo 4, you’ll have no doubt used its Photo Mode, allowing you to take photos of your cars in many poses and situations. PGR3 has a similar feature, and at any point during the offline game, you can pause the action and take a photo of your car in action. There are various photography options to use too, such as focus, shutter speed and contrast levels. You can then save them out to your hard drive or memory card.
Then there is Gotham TV, where you can view certain games that are currently taking place in the Online Career Mode. It’s basically a glorified spectator mode, and it’s really impressive to watch. You can watch different cars, change cameras and even look in the cockpit view too, which is fantastic – it’s like being a passenger! According to Bizarre, when huge world wide tournaments take place, up to 30,000 people will be able to view the race via Gotham TV. A very impressive feat.
To get this sort of quality at launch is very rare indeed, because Project Gotham Racing 3 really is a very good game. It just lacks content that we are used to, especially the online mode which is now severely cut down, and the single player career is devalued to the verge of pointlessness because everything is unlocked for you online anyway. I really hope that the developer looks at the online modes, and adds new features such as Friends Career Online (you could play online career with friends in Forza Motorsport), and of course features like adding lap and race timers to the game and other on-screen information. Problems with cars being spun out too easily when rubbing against other players is an issue too. and your race can literally be ruined by having close races as the slightest touch to the wrong part of another car causes them to spin out furiously – this never happened in the previous game, and it doesn’t quite make sense why it occurs now. If these issues didn’t exist the game would be an easy 9 out of 10.
However until the issues are fixed, I really don’t think the game have the lifespan of two years that PGR2 did before it. So yes, Project Gotham Racing 3 is a great game, but it’s not the game that PGR2 was two years ago. It’s moved sideways instead of moving forward, and that's not quite what I had in mind for a next generation version of my favourite Xbox game.
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