Project Gotham Racing (2001)

This is going to be part one of my play through of the Project Gotham Racing series. I plan on writing reviews for each one and I also want to talk a little bit about the developer Bizarre Creations along the way.

Bizarre Creations started out in the 80s as Raising Hell Software before a name change in the 90s. They earned some success and attention after putting out two Formula One games which led to them getting an opportunity to create a new racing game for the Dreamcast. Metropolis Street Racer was an ambitious racing game that I haven’t had the chance to play unfortunately but I’d like to give it a go one day. It was open world, with realistic environments and day/night cycle and it introduced the kudos system. It was received positively but didn’t sell well most likely due to being stuck on the Dreamcast but they were able to go on and create a spiritual successor.

I have really good memories of the first Project Gotham Racing from around 20 years ago. My family couldn’t afford to get an Xbox until very late that generation, we spent our money on the GameCube and Gameboy Advance first, but luckily a friend had one. I remember having plenty of fun taking turns and working our way through this game together. I was really happy to go back to it recently and discover it is still a bloody good arcade street racer.

The car handling is spot on. It doesn’t have the nuance or realism of a sim but the cars still have a really good weight and feel to them. It’s an excellent mix of fun, precision, style and aggressive driving. And you need to be aggressive because some of the game’s challenges are pretty tough especially if you want gold medals and the AI opponents do not mess around. They love to dive bomb into corners and mess you up. As frustrating as this can be I kind of like it and think it adds to the game. The AI opponents will mess up themselves and other cars not just you and you can be even more aggressive back to them. It made later races in the game feel like a fight. It also encourages defensive driving and feels at home in an arcade racing game.

The tracks are really well designed and the cities in the background are accurate and realistic. Adding to this are the fictional radio stations with popular songs from the time which creates a great atmosphere (or you can use your own soundtrack). The cars look excellent and there is good visual car damage. There are some other nice features like different weather conditions and night races as well. It is really good looking game and I love its presentation and style right down to the little things like menus and fonts.

The main modes on offer are quick race which is normal street races, arcade race which is a score based mode and kudos challenge which is a variety of different challenges like hot lap, overtake and one on one. The kudos challenges also do something interesting with difficulty. You raise or lower difficulty to get more or less bonus kudos and they offer one joker per set of challenges that doubles your Kudos. On top of these modes there are the usual time attack and split screen multiplayer and after a while medal pursuit unlocks which has time trials for each car. Unfortunately though Project Gotham Racing does still feel a little lacking in content and there are not a whole lot of cars or songs here. There are only four locations as well but they are divided into multiple areas with their own street tracks. There are also only six cars per race. While I’m on the negatives I’ll also mention that there are some endurance races (about 15 minutes or more) which I don’t really like in arcade racing games and some of the later normal races drag on a bit as well.

Adding the Kudos point system, that combos and will end if you crash, to an arcade racing game is obviously an awesome idea. Races aren’t just about position and time anymore now there’s a score too. This adds to the replayability and it is tied to progression as well. Progression works really well here with unlocks coming from completing events, earning kudos and time and distance put in. Things move along really well up until later in the game when it does start to feel like a grind and unlocking the final car requires quite a lot of kudos. Thankfully if you don’t wish to do this there is a cheat to unlock everything. That’s right no DLC cars, no paid shortcuts or paid for in game currency, just unlock it or use cheats. Speaking of the good old days this was an Xbox launch title. Anyone that brought this home with Halo as well would have been very happy with their new Xbox. There were many other titles as well especially for the Europe and Australia launch like Jet Set Radio Future, Amped and Dead or Alive 3. Japan got Silent Hill 2 and Genma Onimusha as well.

Going back to this 20+ year old racing game was a joy, I loved it. Even though I had Project Gotham Racing 2,3,4 and Blur lined up to play next, with a massive backlog beyond that, I still wanted to go through all of the quick races, arcade races and kudos challenges. Yes Project Gotham Racing is that good and still that fun, I highly recommend it.

8.7/10