Project Gotham Racing 4

Does Bizarre still shine or is it a rainy day in Gotham?

	Version Xbox 360	Developer Bizarre Creations	Publisher Microsoft	Genre Racing

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If only the rest of the arcade mode was quite as entertaining as the Ultimate Challenge chapter - but they did at least save the best until last here. There aren't enough Time Versus Kudos events in arcade mode, but then again, with so many good event types, and so many cities, it's difficult to see how the arcade game could have been organised or mixed around any better on the whole. Having said that, I do feel that arcade mode is just a little too short and does not go far enough to really push the different challenge types and show off the variety of challenges across the masses of city space and weather combinations possible.

That's where Gotham Career comes in. However short-lived the arcade mode may be, Gotham Career is where the meat is. The event types are largely similar to those in arcade mode, but the main difference is that there are no second chances if you fail an event (hence, career). Unless of course you restart the race right before the point you know you're going to screw it up. But, if you fail to win, you have no choice but to try it again 'next season'. Career mode gives players the motive to push themselves further on the global stage via Live, where things start to get quite epic and also add completely new possibilities such as the ability to race as a team.

It's a vast, expanded, online enabled, no-expense spared version of arcade mode that should more than compensate anyone who feels that the series' traditional singleplayer game was over too soon. The career mode is also really nicely presented and it's clear that this is where the designers want you to be spending most of your time in PGR4, and it results in a Gotham game with a lot more substance than before.

As if there wasn't enough vehicle variation to begin with, bringing together everything from top-end Ferraris to American muscle cars, F1s, karts, prototypes and quirky new specials like the De Lorean, Gotham 4 now introduces bikes into the mix with as much attention to detail as the car line-up always had. I was a bit sceptical about the bikes aspect of PGR4 at first, thanks in part to the rather bland bike-only E3 demo and also my gut feeling that Gotham just wouldn't suit them. It was just as well that, initially at least, I could basically avoid bikes for the most part.

But then a bikes-only chapter of arcade mode popped up and urged me to have a try. After just a few races I had changed my mind. Bikes are great fun to drive around the cities in - if overpowered by the cars on mixed races - but earning kudos by drifting and doing wheelie tricks is so fast and entertaining that it makes the bikes an excellent addition, and later in the game I was as likely to take up a challenge on a bike as anything else.

Although the considerably more dangerous exploits of bike racing are forgiving on the player where errors are made, the risk/reward factor that makes banking Kudos points in cars is even more pronounced in the bikes, particularly in dodgy weather conditions, and thankfully this balance is just right. Most importantly, once you've got the hang of bike riding, they're just great fun.

PGR4 unsurprisingly offers excellent course design throughout the cities. While it would be nice to see a bit more city variation as you progress through each event of the arcade game - for example spending a whole chunk of time on St Petersburg when you start with nothing else for a while - it would be cool to have a more expansive mix. This goes back to what I was saying about the arcade mode being too short; there was nowhere near enough New York or London in there, but I guess the idea was that things balance out once you get into the heat of the Career mode.

The new cities, Macau (China), St Petersburg (Russia), Shanghai (China), and Quebec City (Canada) are all suitably varied and engaging with their different straights, bends, and different undulating terrain. Quebec is probably the most different, reminding me a little of the San Francisco environment from the original game, Metropolis Street Racer, with its up-and-down terrain, and also a little of Chicago from PGR2 with its challenging angular course design possibilities.

There are also two non-city tracks, the gargantuan Nürburgring track in Germany (which was introduced in PGR3) and the Michelin Test Track. You could argue they have no real place in Gotham which is supposedly all about hot cities to race around in, but then you realise how liberating it is to be able to hurtle around these so fast they you nearly take off, without worrying about what tyres you've got or braking at a corner before you've even bought the game. Hell, you can even powerslide over parts of the grassy verges if you're going really fast. In simulation games like GT4 and Forza 2, Nürburgring never felt like this.

There's the option to purchase (using Kudos points) a 'track pack' tracks consists of one really big course from each of the eight cities, but some aren't that large at all - not even the biggest of the courses available in the first place - and there's no custom route editor like on PGR3. However, I was happy to see the return of a Free Roam mode of sorts, like we had in PGR1. It's a multiplayer, online-only game of chase called Bulldog (previously known as Survivor while in development) that finally opens up the streets. I don't know why they couldn't have included a singleplayer Free Roam mode though, if only to humour me - call me a psycho but being able to take your time to drive anywhere in these eight cities to really admire what they've done and also to have unrestricted photo taking opportunities or even machinima type movie making antics in the unlocked streets is something that I think the Gotham hardcore would have appreciated for little or no extra development effort.

I'm also just annoyed that they've taken out some of the coolest parts of certain cities from PGR1. The bridge tour from New York - a favourite for PGR3 players - is gone, and for reasons only known to Bizarre, Times Square area of Manhattan and London's Leicester Square area are way out of the range of the mapped areas for these cities. The crushing disappointment that these areas were not in PGR3 still burns! The larger issue is that in MSR these cities just felt bigger because of the expanded coverage. I wonder whether instead of adding new cities with DLC for this game they should expand the existing ones. Oxford Street! Central Park! Hell just give us the whole city. But this is maybe just a personal issue, I don't know.

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