Customer Reviews

Project Gotham Racing 3

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

If you're a racing fan, this is a must-have game for your XBox 360. If you're just looking to see how good the graphics are on the XBox 360, at lesat rent this game. It's quite impressive!!

You choose from a number of real cars. There are Ferraris, Jaguars, Aston Martins, Lamborghinis, McLarens and much more. The cars look AMAZINGLY good with full detail, and you can choose the color as well.

You race your car through a number of circuits around some quite recognizeable towns. You end up in London, Las Vegas, New York City, Tokyo and Nurburgring. Each location is full of detail. When you drive down the river Thames in London you pass Big Ben. Vegas has gorgeous hotels that I remember from my visits there.

Doing fun stunts earns you Kudos points, so not only are you aiming to win your races to earn cash, but you also want to rack up Kudos points. That makes even the easier races fun, as you do spins, slides and much more.

The world you're in is quite interactive. The people watching the race take flash pictures as you drive past - but if you crash into a fence near them, they all cringe. There are clouds floating by overhead. Mostly, though, there are other racers on the track trying to get by you and steal the lead.

We found the controls to be very intuitive, and the cars handled quite nicely. Note that this is a GAME racing system - i.e. it's not pure realistic. If you smash into a wall at 100mph, your car does not explode into a thousand shards of metal. You simply spin off gently and keep going. That being said, most gamers really don't want a "realistic" racing game. They want a fun one, and this game delivers across the board.

I have to admit that for me, half the fun in this game is the gorgeous landscapes. In Vegas, you drive past the Excalibur and Treasure Island, and the details are picture-perfect. New York, New York is by the track in quite amazing clarity.

I also love the sound in this game - because the soundtrack options are simply awesome. You can choose from a number of soundtracks, from classical to alternative to J-Pop and more. You can even stream in music from your iPod or other MP3 player!

I suppose if you hate racing games, you probably will find this game to be boring. You're just racing cars around in circles with pretty scenery and great sound. But you'd have to be in the minority to not enjoy this game. The cars are amazing. The graphics are amazing. The sound is amazing. Because of the multiplayer options, including up to 8 simultanous live players online, you could play this game for eternity and still find people to challenge you.

If you want even MORE of a challenge, you can even create your own custom route through their maps! You can design your very own custom lap system and challenge others to play on it. Talk about variety!

Highly, highly recommended!

My girlfriend was against me getting an Xbox 360 until she played this game. There's something about this game that really makes it feel as if you're really driving. The attention to detail is amazing. This is the game I put in my Xbox 360 to play when company comes over and they say "oh, you have the new Xbox...". It is totally fun and addicting. My girlfriend is stuck playing the career mode and I actually come home to see her playing it.
This is a funn game.

Project Gotham Racing 3 was the first game I got for my 360. In fact, I got a copy for Christmas before I even had a 360! Let me start by saying this, PGR3 is a great game, if you are looking for a racing game to add to your 360 collection, get PGR3.

The game plays like a forgiving racing simulator. It's not quite as realistic as Forza, but it's defiantly not as "arcade" as Burnout or Need for Speed. It took me about half an hour to get used to the controls, and about an hour or two to get good. The difficulty settings are very well implemented. Before each event, you chose the difficulty setting you want to race at. The first time I played through the game, I did almost everything on the medium (silver) difficulty. I completed all the events in about 12 hours without too much difficulty. I am currently working though it on the hard (gold) setting, and I am about a third of the way through.

The graphics are very good, but flawed in one way; there are a lot of "jaggies." On my HDTV, there is a very thin black jagged line around each car, which is a little distracting sometimes. However, if you don't have an HDTV, then you have nothing to worry about. On my regular TV the game looks like a really good original xbox game, and there are no jaggies.

The sound in PGR3 is amazing. There are five different views that you can drive in, and the sound of the car engine changes accordingly. When you race using the "dash view" (from inside the drivers seat), the engine sound is slightly muffled and just as it would in the real world. When your racing using the "on car" views (where you don't see any part of your car), the engine is noticeably louder and clearer. Each car has its own distinct sound, which is very impressive, and shows the length that the developers went to make a great game.

PGR3 also has a very good soundtrack. There are around eight different genera's of music including rock, hip-hop, classical, techno, etc. If you can't find something you like on the game's soundtrack, or you just feel like racing to your own music, you can easily play songs off of the hard drive or even you iPod.

The main point of any racing game is the cars. In PGR3, there are about 80 cars. They represent a cross section of automobiles. They have classic cars, racing cars, dream cars, concept cars, they have everything. The cars are grouped into classes based on performance. The only thing I would have changed about the cars would be adding a specific "racing class" and adding more racing cars.

The long term value in any "next-gen" game is its online multiplayer, and PGR3 has an amazing multiplayer. When you race online, you race against up to 8 other people in fun, lag free races. It's similar to Halo 2's matchmaking, where the developer's group races (game types) together and you choose what kind of event you want to race in. The people are very respectable, and much less annoying than those who play many other games. I have only run into a few annoying kids, and usually, the rest of the racers warn each other about disruptive players (example: "Hey, the kid in the blue Ferrari is a jackass, watch out for him.").

All in all, PGR3 is a great game, if you love racing games, than you will love Project Gotham Racing 3. Even if you are just looking for a racing game to round out your 360 collection, look no further than PGR3.

I've played the NFS games and this was my first venure into the Gotham world. I should say I'm really hooked. The solo career mode is very addictive. There are a variety of challenges (cones, time-kudos, street race) and they keep the game interesting. The kudos, the credits you get for winning games are just right (it won't take you ages) to unlock new cars. The music and graphics are great. I also love the online play and per car stats you can maintain. The controls are very good (I love drifting!) and overall this was a surprisingly fun game! I've been playing straight for weeks now :)

I bought this game loving the rest of the Project Gotham Series. The whole series is amazing, but this one sure takes the cake for the best.

The graphics are amazing on this next gen game. The enviornments, the cars, the fans... It's all really cool.

The single player is a little different from the last ones. In this there are little sections of about 4 different kind of objectives (Time Trial, Cone Challenge, One on One, and a lot more). You get kudos from completing these challenges. Once you have enough kudos you can buy any car you want (which is different than PGR2).

Online is different too. In this you can choose any car you want (if you've bought them offline or not) if the game is unranked. There are also different classes of cars compared to the others. This game uses the system of Class A, Class B, ect. It's not like the others where you can choose American Muscle and stuff like that.

Overall this is a really awesome game. If you are a fan of racing this is a must have.

first of all i like the gran turismo series,,,except gt 3 which was a let down(i call that a d-jam meaning that it sucked and was craptacular)... then comes along the project gotham series,,which was very nice indeed..lots of fun all around
i got this game on the x box 360 launch night and i was floored when i loaded this in my shiny brand new system...this is next gen racing at its finest... the controles are fluid very responsive..the graphics are top notch ! all the hot cars are there..from mustangs to the shelby cobra to the corvette and all the exotics as well..the street race mode is my favorite because you can just jump in and race..instant gratification :) this game should be taken for a spin vrooooom!! smell that rubber burning !

dont let others make up you mind for you rent this game or buy it you wont regret it

The game stands out for its improved graphics I must say. However, this particular game isn't the winning racer for me. The variety of luxurious cars was pretty good, however it was the game play that really bombed. The hits cars take from each other was a little bit too "weak" and unrealistic. When a car bumps into another it wipes out very quickly, which seems unrealistic again (unless someone can verify that realism by driving over 170 mph on the streets).

I wasn't impressed much, the online game play against other races wasn't too bad and might be worth added to how the graphics are to score some pointers for the game, but it just wasn't all that. One thing that would be great is if the cars were customizable. But in this game, what car you buy is what you get, nothing to customize. Even a Grand Turismo (best racing simulator in my opinion) you can customize some aspects of the car, but not in PGR 3.

This game wasn't a seller, so I traded it back to get Need for Speed Most Wanted, which I must say would be much more my type of racing game. Overall, not that impressive of a racing game unless you just want to watch the 'stock' cars racing on your TV instead....

Project Gotham Racing 3 is easily the best racing game I've ever played - period! I've been a lukewarm fan of racing games until this game came along. Until PGR 3, my favorite racing game was the Need For Speed franchise. However, I hated NFS Underground. There was just too much stuff that interfered with actually getting to race for my liking. Perhaps it shows my age, but I wasn't all that interested in tricking out my car. To me, it felt like NFS lost a great deal in the transition from Hot Pursuit to Underground. I enjoyed Hot Pursuit but one of my biggest gripes was the sheer amount of time it took before I could purchase/unlock the game's pinnacle vehicle: the McClaren F1. By the time I got to that point, all the fun had been sucked out of the game and replaced with the single-minded purpose of just "racking up points" in order to unlock that car. Once achieved, I felt less than enthusiastic about continuing to play the game. Of course, my son came along and wiped all the saved data off the memory chip for the Gamecube (the console we played on prior to the Xbox 360) and after that, I've not played the game since.
When considering whether or not to purchase the Xbox 360, I saw the exotic car porn that was the trailer for the PGR 3 game on a 360 kiosk. Like everyone who saw the trailer, I was mesmerized by the sheer graphic rendering of the vehicles. It was very impressive! I wondered if, like so many movies, the best of what I'd seen was simply that from the trailer. How many times have you been to a movie only to discover that the best parts of the movie were the parts cut and used for the trailer? Not so with this game. In fact, you can't really begin to access the best features of PGR 3 until you buy the game.
Unlike every other racing game I've ever played, you start the game with an impressive array of cars available. These cars are ones you would normally have to work up to in other racing games. You start out with amazing cars. PGR 3 got this part right! You get to hit the ground running in this game!
After you select your first car and put it in your garage, you can start a number of races almost immediately. You can begin your solo career, go online or even system link with other 360 consoles. This is a very welcome feature to me. I don't like to have to go through a bunch of screens and jump through a bunch of hoops just to race. Sometimes I just want to pop the game in and burn rubber. PGR 3 lets you do just that, if you so desire. Of course, you can take as much time as you like before you begin a race.
One really great feature to this game is the availability to "test drive" any car. On other games, you may be able to see a ghost image of a car that will be available once you achieve a set number of points, but you can never really see any details about those cars. Not so on PGR 3. You can see every car that the game has to offer with the exception of concept cars that only become available after a set number of kudos points have been awarded. Sure you may start with 85,000 credits, but you can look at the Ferrari F50 GT and even test drive it! Yep, that's right! You can test drive any car on the test track - even if you don't have nearly enough points to buy it! It can let you know what you might want to work your way up towards. Nice feature! Smart design!
When you play the game online, you have instant access to all the cars right then and there. Sure you may only have an NSX in your solo career, but race online and you can jump behind the wheel of a McClaren! That's a sweet touch! The online feature is fun beyond belief, too. It is fun to race against total strangers and there is a staggering number of types of races (street race, capture the track, elimination, team, etc.) to choose from. There are also an equally impressive number of race venues to choose from (New York, Las Vegas, Japan, etc.). The person who creates the race can also control certain aspects of that race for participants who log on. You can set the conditions to Day, Night, Overcast, force the racers to have the "in car" view, control the number of AI racers, etc.
One aspect that blew me away and that also reminded me of the kiosk trailer was the replay feature of this game. Once you complete a race, you have the option to continue on to the next race or to watch a replay of the race you just completed. If you're not in a hurry, watch the replay. Trust me on this. It is absolutely unbelievable! First of all, you can save the replay to watch again anytime you wish. This in and of itself is a really cool feature. If you have an unreal race and you want to show off, you can save the race and watch it ad nauseum! During that replay, you can also take a picture. This is just too cool! You can forward, reverse, pause or restart the replay, but once it is playing you can toggle to switch the camera angle and freeze the frame. From there, if you select to take a picture, you can literally zoom your camera in on the scene from every angle imaginable. The precise detail is jaw-dropping. It really is! You can do all kinds of things with this picture, too. The game provides you with several Photoshop-esque special effects. For instance, you can adjust the aperture of your picture and thereby produce blur to give the effect of high speed movement. You can change the color and take the picture anywhere from black and white to over-the-top vibrant. You can adjust the focus, the lighting, the brightness, the contrast, etc. Once you get the angle, the effect and the subject framed as you like it, you can take the picture and save it. Again, like the race replay, you can view it at any time.
The best feature of PGR 3 is the amount of control the game gives you right from the start. The graphics are amazing and, arguably, the best graphics during the game are had when racing from the in car view. There are several camera views you can choose from. Two from behind the car, one from inside the car, and two from the perspective of a camera that would be mounted on the front bumper of the car. I might have missed one or two, but you get the point. I prefer the in car view and I sometimes toggle to the behind the car view when I have to thread the needle between cones or archways. I wasn't the biggest fan of racing games because of all the roadblocks to enjoying the game that seemed to be part of the genre. PRG 3 has completely redefined this genre of game for me and has far exceeded my wildest expectations for what I thought this game would be. It is so much better than I had even hoped for!

I was trying to decide between this game and Forza Motorsport 2.
Both have great graphics and solid gameplay, but I actually chose PGR 3 because of what it lacks: ultra-realistic car physics.

PGR 3 is very forgiving when it comes to driving. You'll still find yourself slamming into barriers if you try and take corners too quickly, but you can still take them quicker than you can in Forza 2, where the individual car physics are real-life.

I would have liked more car customization, as being able to solely pick from solid car colors is a bit drab.
The number of cars you can purchase is incredible, with even more that can be purchased from the XBLM.

With PGR4 coming out soon, you should be able to find this title on the cheap (I bought mine used for $15.) If you don't have it yet, now would be a perfect time to get it. If anything, it'll make you even more hungry for the next PGR installment.

There's not much I can say about this game that already has been said.

One thing I want to express though, one of the best things about this game in my opinion is how it mixes the qualities of an arcade racer, and a simulator, and gives you the best of both words.

It offers the accessibility and foregiveness of an arcade racer such as Need for Speed, but it offers a deep, and dynamic racing engine that you would find in a simulator like Gran Turismo.

What does this all really mean? It's fun, and not as serious as a straight up simulator, yet the cars have the same variying strengths and weaknesses of their real life counterparts. The porsche handles like it's on rails. The corvette has raw, straight line power. In most arcade racers, all calls have fairly similar performance. Not so in this game. Racing on a track with long straightaways? Better use the Enzo. Going on a track with sudden stops and lots of curves? The RUF is your best bet. There's an ideal car for each situation.

Another smart feature is that the single player challenges and races scale with the car class. This means that if you pick a supercar like the mclaren F1, you will have 1:30 to finish the lap, if you like mustangs, and pick the Shelby cobra, you will have 1:50 to finish the lap. This means that ALL cars are competitive and up to the task. You wont be stuck having to use one or two of the same top cars. PGR3 is an equal opportunity racer.

The selection of cars is extremely impressive. And it gets even better with more cars and tracks available to download. Exotics, classics, imports, domestics, there's something for everybody.

Aside from this, we all know that no video game is perfect. What flaws does this game have? Well, as other reviews have mentioned, there are no drastic or revolutionary advancements with PGR3. It's quite identical to 1 and 2, with most of the changes being in graphics, camera view, garages, and menu/interface changes. The core gameplay is pretty much the same, but there's nothing wrong there. And, in my opinion, there are some real stinkers in the soundtrack. I give them kudos for being different and putting a lot of international music in the game to suit the locations, but some of the music is a bit too "ethnic" for the games demographic. There are a handful of good tunes in the game though. But if you have an iPod connected to the xbox, then you're set.

The highest difficulty in PGR3 is slightly lower than PGR2, and in my personal opinion, I think the adjustment was an improvement. In PGR2, you would have to either be very talented, or have a lot of time to devote in order to acquire all plantinum metals in all races, in PGR3, you can achieve this in a reasonable amount of time. It took me around 15 hours.

Online races have been flawless in my experience. No lag. However, it would have been nice if there could be more than 8 racers in a given time (as long as they were on tracks that didnt have too narrow roads).

All in all, it's a very fun, polished game. It's more like an updated, polished version of PGR2. Definately worth the price it's going for, and imo the best online racer for the system to date.

And if the game doesnt float your boat for some reason, you still got Geometry Wars! Check it out.