Totally awesome racer. Worth: $30
based on the 360 retail, December 2007
So why isn't it Worth more? Because as much as I love racers, they're still just racers. There's no story, characters, boss fights, inventory, or guns. This puts a fiberglass ceiling on the Worth. With that said, PGR2 is my fourth-most played game after Oblivion, Halo 1, and Morrowind, followed closely by Mercenaries, Halo 2, Galaga, and Doom 1. In fact I played PGR2 for so long, I skipped PGR3. This is fine with me since PGR3 has the sex but no ice cream - uhhh - I mean the Ferraris but no motorcycles.
The game handles differently than PGR2, but it's still good. Within 30 minutes I was able to take Silver in one of the first races.
The multiplayer is much improved over the already excellent multi-player from PGR2. You can customize the matches, and even include a few AI drivers to spice things up. The most fun so far has been me on a motorcycle trying to avoid getting crushed by Angus in his big American muscle car.
The Career Mode sounds a little wacked, but it works well. It's based on a calendar, so you progress through a "season". It sounds more confusing than it is. The game takes care of it, you just race.
The Store sells you cars, but not singly. You buy them in groups of 3 to 6. The developers did a good job of only bothering with cars you'd want to play, so this bundling isn't nearly as annoying as it sounds. The motorcycles generate Kudos so quickly that you'll wind up buying everything anyway.
The difficulty is all over the place. Regular races are wicked easy, just crash your way to the front and get wide for the win. Some of the other race types are totally wacked and required me to get a _lot_ better at the game before I won them. Now that I've got the hang of them it's fun, but there were some unexpectedly steep learning curves here and there.
More as I drive my way to glory.
20 December, 2008
UPDATE: I played PGR4 for about 4 months. At one point, the races got so difficult that I sold the game back to EBGames. After a while I found myself really missing having a good driving game, and last week I bought the game again (used, 'natch). It turns out my problem was I had the difficulty too high. Sure, I _could_ spend weeks and weeks mastering this game, but I'm in my 40s and my real life is already plenty challenging enough: career, family, middle-aged thoughts of mortality. What the hell do I need my games to be so hard for? I set PGR4's Career mode on Easy and now I'm having fun again. It still looks great, plays great, and now I can just (mostly) win everything and have a good time escaping from how stressful my real life is. :)
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