by:	April 10, 2004

Project Gotham Racing 2's roots go back to Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast. MSR was a punishing game - it combined difficult AI and a points system used to advance that forced you to drive for style and completely sacrifice speed. Thankfully, two games later, the system and the AI have been tweaked to make a game that allows anyone to play and enjoy, although some of its past problems remain.

The "Kudos" point system remains at the core of PGR2. While completing a race or set of races is all that is necessary to open further challenges, scoring kudos advances your single-player and online rank, rewarding you with tokens to open new cars. Kudos on individual events are also used to rank you in comparison to every other gamer with Xbox Live. Thankfully, the Kudos system has been improved over the past games in the series. Now tactics that are part of smart racing such as good lines, drafting and clean racing are rewarded, adding to the style-oriented bonuses you've always been rewarded for like powersliding and airtime. This goes a long way towards balancing the game and combining arcade and simulation racing.

The single player game progresses through fourteen car classes, each with a small selection of some of the sweetest rides, in the Kudos World Series where you will go for medals in race, time trial, and kudos based events. In the Arcade Racing mode, you have further challenges in each of these styles to continue to increase your rank. The Steel medals are easy enough for most racers to acquire and thus progress through the game and the Silvers present a good challenge to the average gamer. Gold and especially Platinum is where things get really intense and only the exceptional gamer need bother. Especially in the Cone Challenge events, which base solely on kudos earned the Gold and Platinum standards are outrageous, a minor flaw to be sure but still baffling.

The race modes are the only with AI and thus the only to suffer from the flaws the AI unpleasantly brings. The first primary problem is that the AI forces you to win your races on the first few turns. In many of the races, especially at higher levels, if you don’t make a pass in the first few turns when your car manages to be faster than even identical cars, you lose your chance for the race as then the same identical car outpaces you no matter how well you drive. This is part of the one-way elastic effect of the AI. The AI can drive away from you and get sizable leads but it is very difficult and sometimes impossible to build up a lead on them. The AI also has a tendency to make contact and a lot of it, either intentionally or because it doesn’t realize you are there. Overall, these problems greatly hinder the race modes at the higher difficulties and leave a bad taste in the mouth.