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• Reviewed on: Xbox 360, viewed through a component connection at 720p on a Panasonic TH-42PX50U 42-inch Plasma Viera HDTV.
• The Good: The beautiful cities we race through are astonishingly realistic; changes to career mode allow you to race with the game's fastest cars right away; has plenty of value outside the standard solo career and online career modes.
• The Bad: Solo career mode is surprisingly short; car selection has been pared down significantly; car damage models are nearly non-existent.
• The Verdict: A visually impressive racer that introduces some welcome changes to the standard PGR formula.
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REVIEW:

Asking a developer to improve significantly on lifelike realism is a tall order, but that's what the developers at Bizarre Creations were tasked to do when they set about creating Project Gotham Racing 3, one of the flagship launch titles for Xbox 360.

Racing games are always at the leading of edge of graphics for each generation of consoles. I think it has something to do with the fact that they star vehicles rather than people. As opposed to human characters, cars, with their precise geometric shapes and adherence to strict physical laws, can be programmed to look and behave in a manner that seems much more realistic to our eyes and brains.

The point is that cars in previous generation racers like Project Gotham Racing 2 looked remarkably believable … so much so that as I played through my first few races in PGR3 I found myself thinking that the cars didn't look much better than they did on the original Xbox.

So I popped PGR2 into my old black behemoth (it's worth noting that PGR2 is one of many Xbox games that aren't backwards compatible with the Xbox 360) to see if I could pinpoint how the car models were improved upon in the series' first next-generation outing.

I was surprised to find that, as I played through a couple of races in PGR2, I suddenly felt as though I was looking at a very old game.

The edges of cars looked jagged, reflection effects were inconsistent, and cockpits lacked detail. By comparison, the Xbox 360's powerful anti-aliasing capabilities render beautiful, smooth car body lines in high definition. Well-polished paint jobs and windows reflect everything in the environment almost perfectly, from buildings and trees to fireworks and birds. And the cockpits are spot-on replicas of the interiors of the real-world cars they are based on, with working dashboard instrumentation, gear shifts, and even foot pedals (switching to cockpit view — a feature lacking in PGR2 — provides a great first-person perspective that lets players look around and examine the inside of the car).

Why couldn't I see these enhancements from the start? I think my brain simply painted many of these details into PGR2, in much the same way audiences watching old movies would ignore the strings attached to flying saucers or the lack of scope in soundstage sets.

Speaking of settings, another reason I may not have immediately noticed improvements to PGR3's car models is that they are very subtle compared to the stunning upgrades made to the game's environments.

PGR3 has five race settings: Las Vegas, New York, London, Tokyo, and the Nürburgring, and each one has been meticulously crafted to look like its real world counterpart.

Most racing games provide players with a few routes that wind through cities, but Bizarre Creations took a more open approach to track design. Each city in PGR3 has dozens of turns and intersections that can be joined together to create more than 100 million unique tracks (or so the game boasts).

This results not only in players never — or rarely — racing the exact same circuit twice, but also in cityscapes that have amazing depth and realism. Tracks don't feel like tunnels in an artificial town, but rather like paths carved through a living, breathing city.

As I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time I could see the peaks of Manhattan's skyscrapers looming before me, and within seconds I was zooming between them on the streets below. As I plowed through the strip at dusk in Las Vegas, I darted around and behind famous hotels, thinking about the memorable water fountain scene in Ocean's 11 as I zipped past the Bellagio and orienting myself by keeping an eye on the Luxor's beam of light shooting into the night sky in the distance.

Of course all of this lovely scenery would have been for naught had the game play failed to match it. Fortunately, PGR3 preserves all of the things fans loved about previous entries in the series, from finely tuned car handling (not too realistic, but not too far off, either) to diverse driving competitions.

PGR3's solo career mode invokes the franchise's typical style of play, providing a nice variety of street races and driving challenges, like navigating through cone courses and engaging in maximum speed contests. As in previous PGR games, we are rewarded with kudos (points) for performing daring race maneuvers such as extreme drifts, taking corners at breakneck speeds, and tailgating competitors to use their draft for a velocity boost.

But Bizarre Creations also took some risks with the solo mode. Rather than employing the tried and true racing game formula of working your way up from super slow compact cars to lightning fast street illegal vehicles, players have access to every car in the game right away — assuming they can afford them.

None of the solo career races are based on car class, which means, theoretically, you can use the same car in every race in the game. Victory requirements for each race will change according to the car you select. For example, a hot lap race requiring a time of one minute or better for a Ferrari F50 GT might require a time of 1:10 for a slower car like a Corvette. Similarly, in street races the game will choose cars that approximate the speed and power of the car you select to ensure a fair but challenging competition.

This innovation avoids a pitfall found in many racing games that forces players to rely on only a few different cars throughout the game; typically the fastest available for each class. Now players can feel free to experiment with all of the cars in the game without worrying about their performance capabilities.

The only problem I noticed with this system is that I occasionally found myself getting lethargic. I'd learn to drive well with one car and then race the next dozen races with it simply because I was too lazy to shop for and learn how to drive another.

But this kind of laziness proves a hindrance when moving into the on-line career mode, where races, for the sake of fairness, are governed by car classes.

The on-line mode is essentially just a way to see how you measure up against other players around the world, and it involves a complex ranking system that gauges your abilities.

To succeed on Xbox Live players will need to master a wide variety of cars and racing styles as they engage in standard street races, elimination competitions that see the slowest racer cut after each lap, and new Capture the Track races that involve laying claim to certain portions of the circuit by racing through them more quickly than any other driver.

In another gamble, Bizarre Creations significantly reduced the scope of the single player mode. Unlike many modern racing games that can take upwards of 100 hours to complete, the single player campaign in PGR3 took just seven hours for me to tear through, and I owned about 50 of the game's modest selection of 80 cars by the end.

The logic behind the shorter single player campaign was obviously to encourage players to shift their focus to Xbox Live, but there will undoubtedly be a small number of players who are either uninterested in racing against fellow humans or who prefer spending dozens of hours collecting hundreds of cars.

But don't take the short career mode to mean that PGR3 is bare-boned. Far from it. Little extras that could eat away scores of hours include a fun photography mode that will bring out the artist in even the most die-hard grease monkey; Gotham TV, which allows you to watch the best players in the world in action; a mode called Playtime that gives you the power to create and share your own tracks; and even a couple of little Asteroids-like arcade games found in the crannies of your car garages called Geometry Wars 1 & 2. And I haven't even gotten into all of the Xbox Live gamer card achievements — such as owning every Ferrari in the game or completing the career mode on maximum difficulty — that die-hard players will want to accomplish to improve their street cred among fellow PGR3 racers on-line.

In short, the game is packed to the gills with content, and it plays great to boot. Racing fans considering an Xbox 360 can rest assured that the system has its first quality racer in Project Gotham Racing 3.