Project Gotham Racing 2

Second Opinion - Kristan hares into view

Despite having played an unreasonable number of racing games over the past 12 months, Gotham 2 was the one I was truly looking forward to. The only one with proper online play, 11 new cities to buzz around, dozens of new cars to learn the nuances of, and an unfeasible number of tracks to get to grips with.

Fast

For the most part PGR2 is simply a bigger, more accessible, better looking version of the last one. On the single-player side of things, don't expect to be dazzled by an all new experience - the truth is, it's the same great racing game it ever was, but with some balancing tweaks that you may or may not take kindly to.

The original Gotham was at times an intensely hardcore experience beyond the easiest levels with an almost vertical learning curve. But it was also one of the most beautifully structured punishment-reward relationships we've ever had with a videogame, resulting in endless bleary eyed 3AM sessions trying to crack the seemingly uncrackable.

Some might call this frustrating, and at times it was intensely aggravating to have to be so damned good at the game to really get the most out of it, but that was what precisely what made it so addictive and compelling in the first place, and the satisfaction from finally progressing was a magnificent feeling.

Furious

So why am I sitting here after several weeks in the company of PGR2 feeling slightly underwhelmed by its single player experience? For a start the whole basis for progression has been dumbed down to the point that any vaguely proficient gamer could reasonably blitz through most of the medium difficulty challenges on their first or second go; the simple trick being to save up your Kudos tokens for the best car of each class and romp to victory. There's always an outstanding car, and with that equipped success is mostly a formality with any skill. As a result, all the tension of the finely balanced success/failure of the original has been removed, and while PGR2 is a far less frustrating game for it, it also feels slightly ho-hum to be able to just do a victory parade through hour upon hour of gameplay, unlocking everything with barely a pause for breath.

You can, of course, vow to only play the game on Hard or Expert and falsely set yourself a greater challenge, but while you can earn more Kudos this way, gain a better Live ranking, and rank up quicker, the overall incentive to put yourself through the pain of multiple restarts just isn't there when there's a simpler alternative available. The only reward for playing on the harder settings is a greater choice of cars (most of which are next to useless if the truth be known), and given that careful saving of tokens allows you to more or less always buy the best car the second you enter a new class anyway, what's the sense in prolonging the agony for yourself by making things arbitrarily difficult? At least part of the problem is the fact that Bizarre Creations has ramped up the harder difficulty levels since the preview build to the point now where they're almost unplayable. Before the balancing seemed - to us - to be pretty much spot on, but now the leap in difficulty seems nigh on impossible.

Better or worse?

Meanwhile, though, I'm in two minds about the new Kudos system. While we appreciate that only losing the multiplier when you crash rather than your accumulated Kudos is less frustrating, the game seems to have balanced that up by simply being meaner with the amount of points it dishes out. Getting a decent Kudos total in some of the challenges can feel like pulling teeth; why give with one hand and take away with the other?

Things do ramp up as you progress through the classes, be there's still this rather plodding sense of mechanical victory through scores of challenges, and merely having more cities, more cars, and more tracks doesn't necessarily guarantee that it's more fun. It's more, but that's all it is, it's not necessarily better. After a short while, many of the tracks feel extremely familiar anyway, always reusing sections you've raced on several times before. We're not bemoaning the extra cities by any means, and they're a fantastic addition, but perhaps creating less but more unique tracks, would have been preferable to just padding the whole game out with subtle variations. It also strikes us as pointless to strip out the original four cities out of PGR2. We really liked London, for obvious reasons, and San Fran always brings back good memories and while we appreciate Bizarre wanted to move on, at least offering them as unlockable extras wouldn't have hurt, would it?