The game divides its races by car class. Once you successfully complete a series of races in a car class, the next class becomes available for racing. To clear a race you must beat its goal, whether it is to be a top finisher or to beat a time limit. The nice thing is that you can adjust the goal to match your skill level. The more challenging the skill level you select, the greater the reward in terms of score, ranking, and kudos (more on ranking and kudos later), but players having trouble with a race can lower the bar rather than quit in frustration.

Bring on the muscle cars.

PGR2 just doesn’t make sure that you meet a race’s goal – it will watch how you race and reward good moves. Make it through a tough section of track without hitting anything, power slide around a curve, or take a good line through a turn and the game will add points to your score. These points will be added to the points you earn by beating the track’s goals, and the more points you score the more kudos you’ll be rewarded. Kudos are the currency used in the game to unlock new cars, so you’ll want to earn as many of them as you can.

Remember the integrated Xbox Live support mentioned earlier? Well if you’re plugged into the Internet while racing the game will upload your score and you can see exactly how your run stacked up against other players’. Want to see how other players scored higher than you did? Download a ghost of their run to compete directly against their run or to try and pick up on some of their techniques. This Live integration is basically transparent – just have your cable plugged in when you start the game and you’re good to go. Of course the Xbox Live support extends to multiplayer racing. In multiplayer mode you can race against up to 7 other players to see who is the fastest or who can earn the most kudos in a race.  You can keep the kudos that you earn in online races and Xbox Live will track your performance and rank you against other players.  There is one catch, though.  You'll have to unlock a car in the single player game to use it online.  Well, to use it online and earn race credit that is.  You can still "ghost" drive a locked vehicle so that you can participate in a race.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 95%.  The top racer available on the Xbox, Project Gotham Racing 2 should be a part of every Xbox gamer's library.

« Page 1