On Drafting Soccer Moms (AKA Project Gotham Racing 2 Review) - Page 2

And the tracks. Look, forget everything else about the game, every other track that exists. It has the Nurburgring. Yeah, the whole sordid thing, all 20.8 kilometers of some of the twistiest, gnarliest German racing asphalt ever, lovingly recreated right down to the graffiti on the pavement. Sure it has other locales like Sydney, Washington, Chicago, Edinburgh, Moscow, and Florence, but until you've slung serious metal around the twisties at the 'Ring, you haven't lived. There's a couple of really good videos out there on the net of real drivers taking real cars around the entire ring, and damned if they didn't capture the feel of the 'Ring perfectly.

The racing mechanics are firmly entrenched in that genre I like to call "fun." This is not the Gran Turismo beater for realism, but neither is it utterly arcade, rather striking a precarious balance between the two. You will use that left trigger finger to break if you hope to complete events. You will learn to feather that right trigger on the gas finger if you ever hope to complete some of the later events with 700 bhp beasts that seem intent on nothing more than laying down square kilometers of rubber on the tarmac. However, the driving physics are still forgiving enough that you won't feel like you're fighting the cars to get them to do what you want. Wonderfully, each of the cars has a distinct and noticeably different feel from the others, from the ass-happy Corvette Stingray to the seemingly unflappable Ferrari Maranello, from the low-end grunt of the Mustang 2+2 Fastback to the indomitable top-end of the Ferrari Enzo. Unlike similar titles in the genre, you will most likely drive a fair number of these cars as well after a while. Yes, some of them are throw-aways if you have no overwhelming urge to drive one for personal reasons, but to a large extent the different cars have unique enough characteristics that there isn't always a dominant car in a class for every single event. Have a lot of twisties, 90-degree corners and relatively short straights? Get something with a bit more low- to mid-range torque to pass. Have to complete that cone challenge? Select something with impeccable handling and a bit of ass-hanging ability thrown in to wrack up the kudos.

Kudos. Kudos make this series' world go 'round. Kudos are what determine your "kudos rank" which is subsequently used to determine how many kudos tokens you receive to unlock more goodies. Kudos are earned by driving with "style." Though this can be a bit misleading — some of the top kudos scores on Xbox Live are generated by doing endless doughnuts and tearing up a straight with continuous hand-brake ass-flings, which to me is anything but stylish — for the most part it is effective. Whereas the first game was punishing in its application of the rules governing kudos, this time around the developers have eased up on the restrictions and added some new methods to earn kudos that — to me, again — truly define "stylish". For PGR, merely touching a barrier would kill off any kudos earned during the string. In PGR2 you can graze a wall without diddling your kudos at all. Hit it too hard and you'll invoke some kind of penalty: if you have a combo string going, you'll lose the combo string but you'll still earn the base kudos, or if you have no combo string active, you'll simply lose the kudos. As I mentioned, there are new kudos types that really add to the "stylish driving" aspect: "good line" kudos which rewards lining up turns and hitting the turn-in point and apex of curves at the optimum speed and "drafting" kudos, which rewards you rather handsomely for staying in an opponent's slipstream as long as possible. Both of these kudos types epitomize stylish driving more than some of the standard kudos types like 360s and power slides and, to a lesser extent, 2-wheel and nice air kudos.

Article Author: ColdForged

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