Project Gotham Racing 3 Review

Career Mode

The career mode has been split into two parts – a single player career and an online career. In the single player there are 23 events with each event having several individual races. You can plow through all of it in around 8 hours. Your main objective through all of this is basically to rack up as much cash as you can so you can buy new cars to fill your garages. Money comes quickly and easily and you can have a stable of very nice cars surprisingly quickly. It is somewhat disappointing that it isn’t as big as the career in PGR2, but getting better times and earning better medals will keep you busy for a while.

The online career mode pits you against opponents of similar skill over Xbox Live. These matches are ranked and your main goal is simply to win as many races as possible in order to improve your world ranking. You can play the online career mode forever as there is no real end to it which is very nice and should keep race fans playing for many weeks and months after they finish the solo career mode.

Race Types and Other Modes

PGR3 offers a lot of very interesting race types. You earn more money by competing on different difficulty levels but the competition level and requirements vary greatly between the various difficulties. There are regular races. Elimination races where the last driver on each lap is knocked out. Cone challenges where you earn kudos for passing through cone gates. Time vs kudos races where earning kudos will stop the clock for a few seconds. Speed races where you have to drive past a speed camera at a certain speed or higher. And more traditional time trial “Hot Lap” races. There is a lot of variety in all of these race types which keeps the game from ever feeling too repetitive.

There are a lot of other modes as well. You can play unranked online games in traditional street races, elimination, and a mode called capture the track where you control different parts of the track by having the best time through that section (sort of like Tony Hawk’s graffiti mode). There is also a mode called Gotham TV which lets you watch your friends but also the best overall racers in the world over Xbox Live. You can also create your own courses by plotting your own custom route around the game’s cities.

Graphics and Sound

Graphically, Project Gotham Racing 3 is extremely impressive. This game was built from the ground up to take advantage of the Xbox 360 and it shows. The environments you race in – which are modeled off of real world cities including New York, Tokyo, and Las Vegas – are phenomenal looking and near-photorealistic. The cars also look very good and are undoubtedly the best car models to date. They have a bit of a too perfect and somewhat fake look to them at times, but when the lighting and reflections hit them just right they look absolutely incredible.

The sound is also very well done. The engine sounds from all of the cars are nearly perfect which immerses you in the game even more. Particularly if you are using the in-car angle. The soundtrack is surprisingly large and diverse and features a ton of songs ranging from J-Pop to classical to rock and more.

Bottom Line

Project Gotham Racing 3 is one of the best launch titles on the Xbox 360 for a number of reasons. It looks and sounds like a next-gen game should, but it also plays incredibly well and has a wealth of features that will keep you busy for a long time to come. The Gotham TV feature is one of the coolest things to ever appear in an online videogame and being able to watch not only the best players in the world but also being able to spy on your friends is ridiculously cool. This is incredibly polished and wonderful in pretty much every respect. If you own an Xbox 360, you need to have Project Gotham Racing 3 in your collection.