When Ferrari chose PGR2 as the means for showcasing its never before seen Enzo I knew that we were in for a hell of a treat. The fact that one of the world’s most renowned manufacturers would trust such a beauty to a game developer spoke volumes about its faith in a group of artists. This game is beautiful, jaw-dropping beautiful. We have never seen such beauty in a racing game before. How detailed are the vehicles? When you brake you can see each of the individual grooves on the tail lights. How much attention was paid to the cars? Vehicles with extruding taillights cast shadows onto the rear of the vehicle. Even roll bars from convertibles cast realistic shadows that shift and morph as you hit the turns. In what has to be a first you’ll even see shadows that roll and skulk along the interiors of the vehicles. You’ll even see your driver reach over to the center console whenever you fidget with the radio settings.
I wouldn’t say that PGR2 is the best looking game that I’ve ever played, but it’s damn near close. There are so many little touches and details here that make this such an attractive package. Little additions such as shaded water, trash that exhibits realistic physics and fluttering flags really gives this game a rather complete look. Real-time shadows, bump mapped terrain, it’s all here. Every trick that we’ve seen the Xbox pull off is utilized here with excellent results. What really amazes me is just how much variety there is in the look of the game. Tracks aren’t comprised of a simple and often repeated texture. There is plenty of variation in the track surfaces, whether it be normal pavement, cement, mosaic tiles or bricks, you can be certain that you’ll see one or more of them in each race. All of the surrounding buildings look great too as you’ll easily recognize the capitol building and a number of other landmarks.
Not just a one-trick pony, the artists paid copious amounts of attention to the surrounding environments as well. Every trick that we’ve seen in the top-notch Xbox games has been utilized here. Every single vehicle features reflective surface mapping that accurately shows the surrounding environment on the car’s glossy finish. PGR1 featured a similar technique but it was far less refined and showed only general details, PGR2 shows almost every single portion of the environment including trees and structures. It’s still a bummer to see that the reflections of other vehicles are missing but that’s something to work on for next year. Instead of copping out and giving the windows some limo dark tint the artists show that they have absolutely nothing to hide by providing transparent windows. This allows us to see a fully rendered driver as well as the vehicle’s actual dash and interior.
It’s one thing to see the curves on these beauties but it’s another thing to feel like you’re able to actually reach out and touch them. All of the grooves, curves, designs and panels all look strikingly realistic. It’s almost as if you could run your hand over them and feel each and ever single facet of the vehicles. We’ve seen some pretty amazing vehicles in the past few years but nothing as impressive as this. Forget about the cars in
Apex, forget about
Gran Turismo, at this moment
Project Gotham 2 features the cleanest and most realistic looking vehicle models on the market. Apparently the guys at Microsoft are great negotiators because they’ve managed to convince every single manufacturer in the game to allow their beauties to be destroyed and mangled. This was a huge problem with early racing games in the late 90s as well as the 3rd
Gran Turismo, but it’s non-existent here. Vehicles now exhibit realistic damage modeling that is consistent with real world crashes. Forget about the over-the-top damage model in
Apex, this one is as realistic as they come. Cause enough damage to the rear end and you may even see your trunk start bouncing up and down as you brake and shift the weight of the vehicle from the rear to the front.
Even with all of its beauty there is one major flaw that really mars this entire package. On the night levels the car will flicker in and out to simulate the effect of driving underneath and past streetlights. Well the problem is when you hit high speeds the car will flicker at a ridiculous pace, rivaling that of a strobe light. What makes this even worse is that you can actually see your vehicle passing underneath the street lights and the timing of the flicker in regards to the motion is uneven, leading us to believe that the designers predetermined some of the lighting on the basis of your speed as opposed to the actual environment. I wouldn’t usually point something like this out but it’s really distracting and actually forced me to switch to the cockpit view on a few occasions.
It’s kind of disappointing to see that the tracks are so empty though. With so many high-powered vehicles roaming around the streets one would expect to see some spectators or at least film crews or signs of life. There none to be found, no pedestrians, no traffic on non-circuit streets and no animations.
Apex did a great job by providing plenty of atmosphere for the player to chew on; vehicles driving on surface streets in the background, balloons being launched to celebrate the beginning of a race. Sadly none of that is to be found here and it makes the world look really plain and empty.
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