Hmm. Definitely feels more like PGR1 than PGR2 in terms of content and city count. We've stepped down from the eleven cities of 2 to less than half of that. We got Las Vegas, London, New York, Tokyo, and my favorite bustling cityscape, the Nurburgring. Seasoned PGRtaku will immediately notice that london, NYC, and tokyo were all already in the first game, so really the only fresh addition is the one city of Vegas. The soundtrack also bumps as per usual, with quite a decent amount of good ska and J-pop beats goin around.
The singleplayer basically is roughly the same as the first game, though a bit less balanced. Gone are the car classes as this game sticks to the rule of "every car has to hit 170 at minimum" so like every possible car choice is cracked right out the gate. I understand wanting to get straight to the good stuff out the door, but one of the core things I enjoy about PGR (and racing games in general, honestly) is the slow buildup from okayish cars to the good ones. I pretty much got one decent car pretty quickly on in and just stuck with it through the whole game and EASILY cruised past everything on the medium difficulty. I'd honestly suggest playing on hard or expert if you want this game to last any decent chunk of time or have any sustainable challenge.
The online support was a key part of what made PGR2 so cool, and this game appears to have tried to expand upon that by way of this broadcasting system showcasing what people are doing around the world. Key word being "appears" here though, cuz the servers are long dead so I can only really speculate what this game was like at its prime. There is the regular online multiplayer still up though, and I have heard that they added a bunch of cool new game modes like legitimizing the "cat & mouse" house ruleset into an actual playable game type. Can't say I've actually tried it as not only have I not found anyone that still has a 360 lying around for car gamer time and even if I did myxbox live gold game pass core membership has expired so i'm SOL on the online features, unfortunately.
Visually this is the game to take the series into the HD era, and it looks quite good! Only real gripe is that the dark areas of the game are really crunched out, and no amount of RGB range adjustments on either my TV nor my console could fix it so I guess that's just how it's supposed to look. I do think though that even if we specifically compare launch racing titles on the 360, ridge racer 6 has this game beat in terms of aesthetics both in menus and in the actual game rendering itself.
Overall it's certainly just existent, which is really surprising for me given how much I've enjoyed the first two games. It's really apparent from a lot of early 7th-gen titles that the jump in fidelity really cost a decent amount of game content from their late 6th-gen peers as devs require more time to make the most out of the new specs (sure hope that doesn't balloon over time!) Maybe my time would have been a lot more exciting had I been there in 2005 racing with the homies. Regardless, it's a game!
The singleplayer basically is roughly the same as the first game, though a bit less balanced. Gone are the car classes as this game sticks to the rule of "every car has to hit 170 at minimum" so like every possible car choice is cracked right out the gate. I understand wanting to get straight to the good stuff out the door, but one of the core things I enjoy about PGR (and racing games in general, honestly) is the slow buildup from okayish cars to the good ones. I pretty much got one decent car pretty quickly on in and just stuck with it through the whole game and EASILY cruised past everything on the medium difficulty. I'd honestly suggest playing on hard or expert if you want this game to last any decent chunk of time or have any sustainable challenge.
The online support was a key part of what made PGR2 so cool, and this game appears to have tried to expand upon that by way of this broadcasting system showcasing what people are doing around the world. Key word being "appears" here though, cuz the servers are long dead so I can only really speculate what this game was like at its prime. There is the regular online multiplayer still up though, and I have heard that they added a bunch of cool new game modes like legitimizing the "cat & mouse" house ruleset into an actual playable game type. Can't say I've actually tried it as not only have I not found anyone that still has a 360 lying around for car gamer time and even if I did my
Visually this is the game to take the series into the HD era, and it looks quite good! Only real gripe is that the dark areas of the game are really crunched out, and no amount of RGB range adjustments on either my TV nor my console could fix it so I guess that's just how it's supposed to look. I do think though that even if we specifically compare launch racing titles on the 360, ridge racer 6 has this game beat in terms of aesthetics both in menus and in the actual game rendering itself.
Overall it's certainly just existent, which is really surprising for me given how much I've enjoyed the first two games. It's really apparent from a lot of early 7th-gen titles that the jump in fidelity really cost a decent amount of game content from their late 6th-gen peers as devs require more time to make the most out of the new specs (sure hope that doesn't balloon over time!) Maybe my time would have been a lot more exciting had I been there in 2005 racing with the homies. Regardless, it's a game!