Review NaN of 5
Price Paid:
$85.00
from Target Summary:
Well, it's been a long time since I bought a car racing game. I thought I was tired of the genre. After playing Sega GT which was bundled with my Xbox for a couple of hours and then dropping it, I started to promise myself I'd never buy another car racing game. I had Gran Turismo 1 and 2 on PS1, but decided not to purchase Gran Turismo 3, even at Platinum price. I was just fed up of being forced to grip drive to even get anywhere in a game, and the difficulty of Sega GT just topped it off.
Project Gotham Racing looked like a good prospect for getting me back into the genre, so I held off until PGR2 came out. Even then, I was hesitant about getting another Sega GT, however I was sold just listening to some shop guy rambling on about the graphics and how you progress through the game by driving with style and doing powerslides. Ridge Racer anyone? Well, maybe not, but a game that finds a near perfect balance between realism and fun.
The game basically works as follows. You earn kudos by driving with style. That means anything from powerslides, air and 360s to taking good lines through corners and drafting/overtaking cars. There is a two-second window after you make some kudos to chain a combo to it. If you don't get any kudos in two seconds, your combo ends and you receive the points plus a bonus, depending on the type of combo and how long it went for. If you hit a wall, you lose any bonus you had from performing the combo. You can also earn kudos at the end of a race for time, position and clean race bonuses. Kudos lets you unlock cars, and you get to choose which cars you unlock in what order, too. The kudos system is excellently tuned, and enjoyable the minute you start driving. There is no vehicle customisation in this game, as the focus is on style. I personally find this refreshing from the latest trends in racing games.
The core of the single player game is the "Kudos World Series", which is a series of races divided up into different car classes. Races may take the form of overtaking a certain number of cars in a certain time, beating a specified lap time, one on one, street races and cone challenges. In addition to the Kudos World Series are various other modes such as circuit and car challenges, and speed camera challenges. The tracks (about 100 or so) are based on real locations such as Sydney, Washington DC, Barcelona and Florence. You can even unlock the Nurburgring racetrack to hoon around on at over 300km/h. Bizzare Creations apparently went and mapped out the places. There's alot of variety in the corners, declination and architecture, which helps you navigate your way through the tracks easier.
The game is setup in such a way that it allows you to go at your own pace. Each race can be done on five different difficulties. Higher difficulties earn you higher kudos bonuses. Only your all time best kudos performance counts for a particular race. So, for example if you do a race on novice, easy, medium, hard, the expert, and get 500, 1000, 2000, 3000, 5000 kudos bonuses respectively, you'd have 4500 kudos earned. If you just did the race on expert and got 5000 kudos bonus, you'd have 5000 kudos. So there's no cheating. i.e. You can't just keep repeating a race to rack up huge kudos. However, your kudos will still go up if you keep improving.
The live mode from what I've heard, is fairly well done, with all of the obligatory features such as scoreboards, global rankings, uploading ghosts etc. Kudos can be earned live, as in any other mode. However, I'm not sure if you can trade cars online. As I don't have Xbox live, I can't really comment further on this aspect of the game. Report this review >>
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