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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable racing game - until it becomes impossible, 11 Dec 2003
Project Gotham is initially one of the more entertaining race games. Up until you get through your third Kudos Racing season and the 3rd Arcade Challenge/Quick Race Challenge you'll be having great fun in your beautiful Nissan Skyline, screaming round corners and doing stunts.Then the game's difficulty curve becomes too steep and you find yourself trapped, unable to complete a certain challenge and therefore unable to advance through the game. You'll find yourself attempting an Overtake Challenge for the 13th time and you'll realise with accelerating dismay that you are wasting your time. Project Gotham offers the most limited choice of cars outside of rally sims. It takes the rather offensive route of awarding the player with the same cars over and over again - e.g. soft-top and tin-top models of the same vehicle which are basically the same car with no performance difference. Many of the cars have statistics so similar that again, they might as well be the same vehicle (Lancer and Impreza). Most of the cars included do tend to be fun to drive and they all look fantastic. There are a couple of oddities: the VW Beetle looks like it's been stretched, the BMW Z3 cannot take corners without coming out of them completely sideways, the Ferrari F355 has a very high "Handling" score but spends most of the race struggling not to do doughnuts. The gameplay is very fast and furious. Losing your concentration for a few seconds is the difference between earning a medal and being sent spinning to the back of the pack. There's nothing so exhilerating as flooring the throttle downhill in a Camarro. It's extremely rewarding to take a powerful rear wheel drive monster round the American circuits amassing thousands of Kudos points. Gameplay flaws are present in most races. The enemy cars make successful attempts to nudge, bump and block the player, and they seem to get a speed increase on the final lap of a race. Let a car out of your sight and it'll build such a lead you may as well restart the race. You will find yourself racing the same opponents over and over again which gets really, really boring. The tracks are OK to look at. Most of them are far too cramped to accommodate side-by-side racing and you will be losing hundreds of Kudos points on the tighter corners which simply don't allow powerslides. The game modes: Overtake Challenge: You'll learn to dread these. You need to pass slow-moving cars who invaribly get in the way on tight corners. You'll spend on average 50% of the race just trying to catch up with all the other cars, and that's if you don't waste time gathering Kudos. Ugh. Kudos Challenges: Involves burning round a track trying to rack up Kudos points. The targets become ridiculously high as you advance. (1600 Kudos in a 3-lap race - the most I've ever got on this track is 1450!) I cannot overemphasise how soul destroying this gets. Street Race: The only really enjoyable element of the game - a high speed run round town a la Gran Turismo. Hot Lap: Can be fun. You need to complete a track under a set time limit. The time limits are usually pretty fair. 1-on-1: Race a new, more powerful car. No matter what this car is it's always faster and better round corners than yours (imagine my amazement when a computer-controlled Chevy Corvette cornered better than my Nissan Skyline!). If you do beat this car you unlock it and can use it at any time. Pointless extras include unlocking horrible new colours for your car (the new colours are the same for each car). Oh, and tons of those useless time trial tracks every racing game features for bored players keep unlocking themselves. Woo. You should find the Ford Focus to be the most useful car initially due to its better than average handling. After that the Nissan Skyline and the Panoz Esperante are very exciting to drive, particularly the Esperante. The later cars - including some of the Ferraris - oversteer so badly they are no good on most tracks, and the British and American muscle cars are a bit of a joke seeing as they all have a handling rating of 4 or 5 out of 10! I'd recommend giving this game a miss now that Project Gotham 2 is out.
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