I’ve never been the biggest fan of racing games. Either they don’t control right, they try to be too realistic, or they’re just too complex. I mean, who wants to play a marathon race, where you’re going around the same oval for an hour and a half? I won’t name any names, but that’s not an exaggeration. Also, I’m not a car dork. I don’t want to be messing around with my suspension or calibrating some part I’ve never heard of and don’t even understand their purpose.
Enter Project Gotham Racing® 2. It falls somewhere right in the middle of what I want: It’s not too arcade-y. It’s not too simulation like. It doesn’t ask me to build the car, and racing to the finish line is only part of the equation.
It’s that last part that I like best. This game actually rewards you for driving with style. Driving in smooth lines, clearing long sections without making a mistake, and power-sliding like a maniac rewards you with Kudos (basically just a fancy name for points). The more Kudos you get, the more your rank goes up, and the more your rank goes up, the more you can unlock.
This brings me to the one downside I saw with the game. When you first start, only one set of cars is unlocked, and not even all the cars within that set are available. Ah, well. With a little skill, you’ll be opening up new sets of cars in no time. It does make for a pretty cool rewards system when you get enough Kudos tokens to buy a new car or you complete one series of races to open up a whole new set. For instance, I just completed the Sports Convertible series with my newly purchased Porsche Boxster S, and now I can race in the Coupe series.
Project Gotham Racing 2 also gives you specific goals for every race. For instance, one time you may be racing a pack of cars to the finish line, another time you might just be racing one car, or you might be trying to overtake a certain number of cars to earn enough Kudos points to finish the challenge. Whatever the goal, it does a really nice job of mixing things up, so you don’t feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over.
Oh, and I can’t forget one of the best parts. This game is on XboxLive, so you go online and outrace your buddies. And, every time you finish a race in single-player mode, it posts how well you did online, and you can compare your point totals after every race. You can also upload or download ghosts to race against, so if your friend isn’t online at the moment, you can put one of your ghosts up there for him to race against when he is around. Very cool stuff.
Overall, the slick graphics, tight control, insane amount of options, and overall new take on the whole racing genre has left me really impressed. This isn’t just a rental recommendation, this is a go beg your parents for money to buy it recommendation: 4.5 out of 5 stars!
