Although you’ll definitely want to partake in the career mode you’ll have another method of moving up the Kudos rankings at your disposal, the Arcade Mode. In this mode you’re thrown onto a track with a set vehicle and an objective. Which medal you choose to vie for dictates just how difficult the goal will be to accomplish. As you complete harder tasks you’ll unlock more of them, all of which will help increase your Kudos ranking within the game. You can also race in car-specific challenges which will help you unlock some of the game’s harder to ascertain goodies. If you want you can choose to engage in vehicle-specific challenges which will also unlock more secrets.
As was the case with
Project Gotham and
Metropolis Street Racer, PGR2 employs a Kudos system for the unlocking of new vehicles and features. As you race and compete you can earn Kudos by performing a number of driving maneuvers. Essentially concentrating on your style and panache, you can earn these little guys by power sliding, gaining air, riding on two wheels, completing laps without hitting anything and completing sections without hitting anything. New to this year’s game is the ability to earn points by drafting and performing 360s in the middle of the race. The new additions are rather lame at best as the game doesn’t really emphasize the use of drafting all that much and performing 360s in the midst of a race is pretty self explanatory.
If you’re in the market for some frantic and exciting white knuckled racing then you’ve come to the right place. For reasons that I can’t fully express in words, driving around these tracks is just an orgy of gaming goodness. When it comes to Arcade racing,
Project Gotham 2 offers the perfect blend of excitement and realism. You’ll be able to pull off some truly amazing driving maneuvers as you drag your beast through some of the smallest streets that the world has to offer. There’s just something inherently exhilarating about pulling your Porsche 993 around a hairpin at 90mph, straightening it out, hitting a 90 degree turn at 150mph and escaping unscathed. Even though you’re sliding all over the place you’ll always feel like you’re in complete control of the vehicle. As you become more accustomed to the physics driving these vehicles feels like a natural extension of your body, just the way that it should be.
And while the races are always exciting they’re hampered by the game’s insane AI. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen AI opponents behave so recklessly. Don’t think about invading their private space because they’ll do everything in their power to knock you out of the way. In fact, most of the time your opponents will act like you don’t even exist as they plow your $80,000 ride into a guard rail without any hesitation. This is because PGR2 employs an AI system that hearkens back to the days of
Mario Kart where the vehicles are placed on rails and will do nearly everything in their power to maintain that line. This causes them to do a number of inane things such as ramming you from behind, side swiping you as you try to pass and just hitting you whenever you come within the near vicinity. Perhaps the largest annoyance comes after they engage in a collision and spin out. When they’re kicked off their path or are facing the wrong way they’ll take up the entire road to turn their vehicle around, causing a huge gridlock behind them. In real life I can’t envision a professional driver would be so inconsiderate as to hold up a race just to turn his vehicle around. It’s also highly dangerous as an opponent could easily plow into the driver side of the vehicle at high speeds without being able to avoid him. The AI has some huge problems for sure and it really needs to undergo some major overhauls.
Thankfully you’ll be able to take your game online to compete with up to seven other human opponents. For the most part the races are lag free and I noticed very little, if any, warping of opponent’s vehicles. Like the other Xbox Live titles you can choose to join a random match, engage in an optimatch with specific conditions or create your own game. One of the problems that I had with the online play was the manner in which the players conducted themselves. I swear, I felt like I was playing with a bunch of 12-year-olds who had never been to an arcade in their lives. They’d smash, crash and crush their way to victory, not caring about whom they might piss off. For the most part the players on XBL are very reckless and exhibit no professionalism or etiquette. It’s not the fault of the actual game itself but it would be nice if there were rules to help govern the races to make them feel more professional and realistic. I liked playing against my friends across the country but I basically choose not to play against random opponents, basically on the account that really can’t conduct themselves properly.
In order to see how you compare against the competition you can log onto Xbox Live and view a real-time scoreboard that ranks all of the players who are currently online. All you do is scroll to a track, play through it and match up your best score against the rest of the community. I applaud this as it gives you a nice barometer of just how good you are, but I’m a little disappointed that the designers chose to use Kudos as the measuring stick as opposed to lap times. Actually, it’s downright lame to believe that players look at Kudos as a measure of how good their opponents are. Thankfully you can download the ghosts of other opponents so that you can race against them and see what kind of techniques that they used to earn their points. At least that way you can tell if they were actually racing or were just driving for the sole purpose of gaining points and ignoring the stage goal.
Page 2 of 4
