Is PGR 4 a sim or an arcade racer? Which is better PGR 3 or 4? These are pretty difficult questions to answer and you could argue either way for both questions. Does it hold up in 2024? That's a yes from me.

PGR4 is a sequel that doesn't try to change to much. It keeps the excellent city tracks from the first game and makes them more detailed. It keeps the nice balance of arcade and sim racing that makes it appeal to all racing fans. It keeps the fun kudos system and the excellent soundtrack. It is basically PGR 3 but slightly, really slightly, better. I mean honestly, one of the most hyped upgrades this game has over PGR3 is the dynamic weather, which while cool, doesn't really change the game.

The racing itself is also very similar to PGR 3. The track based format creates more interesting and competitive racing and the difficulty modes keep it fun for a long time. There are also 2 very nice and detailed single player modes to keep you entertained. The career mode is what you would expect. You race against other similarly ranked drivers as you gradually build up fame and move up the rankings. There are a nice selection of race types and the mini league format works well. The more interesting mode though is the medal challenge. This mode gives you a selection of events that you must tackle one by one. However, each event has 5 different sub events, each one slightly harder than the last. You can overtake 3 cars for a silver medal or overtake 5 faster cars for a gold medal. Instead of just repeating the same event to get a better rating, these events are split up based on the rating. It's a nice little system that I am surprised isn't used more and it's a nice challenge.

A great one for the 360 collection especially if you liked 3 as it's basically more of the same.

Probably showing my bias against fighting games here, but this is another fighting game that I couldn’t get in to. I was actually pretty surprised about that as SC2 is one of my favourite fighting games of all time. I really enjoy the use of weapons as it increases the variety of the characters move-sets and makes the game simpler tactically. For example, a character like Kilik is quick and has great range with his long staff. This makes it pretty clear how to play as or against him as soon as you pick up the game and thus easier to get into compared to a lot of fighting games.

Soul Calibur IV brings back some of these characters and introduces some new ones keeping the weapon based combat and large character variety mostly the same. It also introduces some new characters including some star wars characters and a character creation mode. These additions didn't really appeal to me, the new characters are fine but the star wars characters really don't fit into the game. Another aspect of the game which is a let down is the boring game modes. The game has a very short and bland story mode, with little story and a tower of souls mode which is not as exciting as it seems. The tower of souls is just another multi fight mode, with all the fights set in similar boring square arenas. Now, combat wise SC4 is decent. The fights have a nice ebb and flow and are quite tactical if perhaps a little slow for my liking. Yet, this doesn't really make up for the rest of it's flaws. A fine fighting game that probably should have been a great one. In the end, I would rather just play SC2.