I think Project Gotham Racing 4 can be summarized in the wise words of a penguin.
“Slide!”
Lots of that going around, technically called drifting. It’s pretty, it’s usually fun, and it’s how you get better cars and win races. If that’s your bag, well then here you go, get PGR 4. For the rest of us…
PGR4 is the Xbox 360 racer which walks the line to varying degrees of success between simulation and arcade racing. In a sim racer, for example, you won’t be pulling most turns at 65 MPH, sliding the whole way. In an arcade racer, you won’t be bothering to hit the brakes and slide at all. Yet here PGR4 sits, with real cars and motorcycles filling out the roster, performing beyond the limits of reality while managing to be accurate relative to each other. It provides a technical challenge and test of the reflexes, as well as the cojones to do 234 miles per hour on a motorcycle power by a jet turbine(yes, that means the MTT Superbike is in the game).
It’s a formula that can be a lot of fun, and the learning curve isn’t too bad. The cars players start with control easily, and later cars drift all over the place and can be very difficult to handle, but can give the best times and the most points in the game(known as, ugh, kudos), which are used to buy tracks, more vehicles, and the occasional special feature. The early stages of career mode, and lower ratings of cars, feel like a very long training exercise in a way, but they’re a lot of fun anyway. Courses range from the overly-technical to practically straight runs, allowing for most cars and bikes to have a well-suited stage.
Most sets of stages in career mode, however, will vary too much to make a particular car or bike suited toward it, particularly in Hotshot or Masters tournaments. To make it worse, at that point the best way to describe the AI is “a bunch of unrelenting dickheads who don’t care if they win as long as you lose.” The AI in Masters levels crashed into walls more than any Amateur rank AI did. And it happened to do it right in front of me all too often, blocking me thoroughly for precious seconds. In a car, there were countless times it just served to muscle me off the road, or on a bike, simply slam into me until I fly off.
I can’t complain too much, though, as up until that point, it was pretty damn fun, though the game’s difficulty rankings jump tremendously. There’s no real curve between the point where a player wins every competition blindfolded and stuck in first gear on easy, and can come in somewhere better than dead last on normal. It seems entirely likely that players will stay for a tremendously long time in the difficulty they began with.
Multiplayer mode is simple, but good. No surprise really. Take the cars purchased online, race them against other players. It’s certainly fun, but it doesn’t stand out against the career mode particularly, aside from seeing more cars and playing more tracks with different qualities than career mode has, but nothing that can’t be done in arcade mode. Since all the cars have default paint sets, there’s not a huge variety. There are also patterns which can be applied to cars and manipulated to an extent(colors, angle, position and width/length), but no originals are in game, making the ability to show cars off nullified.
Graphically, the game is good. The cars are are very well modeled, and all have a brilliantly reproduced dash console. There are, unfortunately, a few small issues with them. The accuracy can, at times, result in them being effectively invisible. Some night races, or cars with exceptionally dark tint, for example, will have completely obscured gauges. Sometimes wheels get in the way as well, and while you can look around in the car, you can’t actually move your head around. A few cars also have visibility issues inside, notably a few high end Ferraris which have short windshields. Limited vertical visibility can end up feeling claustrophobic in the game, and really cause problems on tracks with lots of hills. Motorcycles suffer from having instruments at different heights, relative to the driver’s viewpoint, which can be either entirely in view and obstructive, or totally unseen. Generally it means there’s too much time spend looking down on bikes, or just hoping for an angle in car, to effectively work manual transmission. While all other modes have a perfectly effective HUD, with a completely unobscured tachometer, the option to turn it on or off in car is sorely lacking, and leaves players trying to operate by sound alone too often, rather than look around at high speed with sharp turns approaching. It’s also almost required, in later stages, that players manually shift to get the quick acceleration needed to win. The game does something great in this regard, allowing players to shift up or down even in automatic mode(where, rather than an actual automatic transmission, the gear is simply shifted automatically), but the HUD issues persist obviously.
All the graphical prettiness with cars comes at a price. Sure they shine nicely, but damage? Extremely limited. Windshields crack, mirrors can get knocked off, and cars scrape up. That’s it. After slamming into a wall at 150 MPH, I expect some fucking damage. It’s worth noting some of those crashes weren’t my fault, but the fault of totally missing frames. There’s some major issues in large races, 6 or more racers can really kill things, and if 8 show up, expect some major trouble, be it offline or on. Nothing says fun like losing a race at the last second because you can’t see what’s happening. On a last little nitpick, the mirrors make everything like very horizontally compressed.
The game’s sound shines, fortunately, and doesn’t stutter. Cars sound brilliant, especially sitting on the inside or on top of a motorcycle. There’s a solid enough audio quality to shift by sound if one is so inclined, and no vehicles sound alike. Plenty of gearheads should be able to pick out just what’s coming up on them, and what they need to do in response to the situation. Too bad the game’s music blows, and you’ll need your own custom soundtrack, which can make hearing cars and gears a bit difficult. My Chemical Romance and some incredibly repetitive techno are the order of the day here, and I’m wondering who thought “Let’s get some music tips from EA!” at Bizarre Creations. When you can hear what you’re driving though, it’s superb.
Complaints aside, it’s a fun game generally, it just gets old fast. Some things it does very right, like dynamic weather, which can mean a track goes from dry to slick and wet over the course of a few laps, or heavy fog fortunately lifting. But that leads to an issue, as some tracks and championships are way, way too damn long, notably one in Europe which is a solid 7-10 minute lap. Even the longest of Longcats will find it to be a bit much.
Still, the game kept me quite interested for a good week, which is more than most racing games ever manage. The variety was a bit lacking, despite the different event types(races, point challenges, cone sprints, races with special conditions that still boil down to going really fast and not crashing) and vehicles, especially as motorcycles feel so damn gimped by the end of things. Until the AI starts, for lack of a better term, cheating(all AI does it, this does it visibly), it’s fun. It’s a reasonable challenge usually, and the sense of speed is usually there. Moments of major framerate drop or the AI will really bring it down though, and the fact the urban races all look very samey and hollow(a classic problem for racing games, making a city look alive), only broken up by the occasional actual race track in the middle of nowhere. But hey, if it was no good, I wouldn’t have had such a horrible case of throttle claw after spending an hour trying to set a speed record on the game’s test track. Yeah, throttle claw is, it turns out, way way worse than any DS claw, and that includes the original model.
Project Gotham Racing 4 gets 3.5 out of 5 canes. It’s got a few major issues which could have been fixed, but is really good game, and for racing fans is going to be a sure thing. More customization, a non-shitty soundtrack, and some polish really could have boosted the score, as well as a bit more variety and balance.
