While this is a fun racing game, it doesn't really do much to make you forget about the superior PGR 3.
As I stated, the single player side of PGR 4 is spend in the new career mode. This mode is a bit different than most career modes in racing games. It's built around going through a 'season' much like in Nascar racing. For each tournament that you participate in, you gain points depending on how you do in the tourney. The better you do, the more points you get. As you go through seasons, you move up the rankings and eventually become the #1 ranked racer in the world. Along the way, you accumulate tons of the game's trademark (Kudos, of course) that you can spend in the shop to purchase new cars, tracks, etc.
I will give Bizzare Creations credit for trying something different here, but it doesn't really make a repetitive career mode structure any better & there are some people who will really NOT like this. The main difference is that you can't go back and redo races after you have finished them. You can in the arcade mode, but not in career mode. So for you guys who loved to do a race and then give it another shot on a higher difficulty after, you might get irritated with this. I actually found it nice to have it this way, but I really didn't like it enough to forget about the fact that I am still going from race to race just like in PGR 3.
And due to how the mode is structured, you don't even have to win many races to move up in the rankings. You could just finish 2nd, 3rd or whatever you wanted and you still get points. Sure it would take you longer to move up in the ranks, but you will move up steadily. The game also really pushes you past the need to use the lower ranked cars in the game. I have used maybe ten cars and motorcycles total in my whole time playing the game. Oh and about those motorcycles.....
This was an obviously much-talked about addition to this game, but I didn't really think it changed the game all that much. Sure it was fun to use them, at first, but I liked using the cars better. The funny part is trying to see how much it takes to actually knock someone off their bike. I would sideswipe walls many times only to keep on driving. It almost takes someone running you down or you going face first into a wall going about 80 mph to get you off your bike. While that is kinda nice due to how people would smash you all over the track online, it's very unrealistic. And the only real advantage of using the bikes is the huge acceleration and nice cornering, but they lose on any track that has long straight aways due to the lower top speed. In general, they are fun to use but don't bring a whole lot to the game.
Another addition is the new weather effects. Now these actually DO change the way the game is played quite drastically. They also look fantastic, but more on that later. As you are playing through the game, you will run into different kinds of weather that really change the way you race and even what car you should use. If you try taking a hard-to-handle, low-grip car out on an icy track.....you are going to be in trouble. I think the coolest effect are the puddles you hit while going along that make your car hydroplane when you aren't expecting it. It can really change a race, as the CPU (and other humans, obviously) can catch up quite quickly if you go into a wall due to hitting a large puddle at 150 mph.
As usual, the online play is pretty good and will keep you busy for awhile if you get into it. You can also take pictures and have them rated online. You can do the same with video replays. And you can't beat walking into your garage and finding a new 'Geometry Wars' game to play. Of course, it kicked my @ss more than 'Evolved' did. Here's hoping the game comes to XBLA soon.
As for the visuals, the new weather effects look outstanding. The rain, in particular, is absolutely distracting as you watch it on your hood. The game, as a whole, looks very nice. It's not the jump in quality I was hoping for, but the game looks nice overall. The cars could use a little more work and when will ever get real damage on these vehicles?!! The cities also looked good, but a lot of the time, I felt like I was playing PGR 3 again due to some of the same tracks making another appearance here.
The audio in the game is somewhat disappointing. The sound of the cars and the effects while racing are all solid, as usual. My problem is with the music selection. Now while I am happy we don't get the "we sell our souls to the devil to get crappy licensed pop-punk & crap hip-hop" kind of soundtrack that EA keeps shoving down our throats in the Burnout of myriad of mediocre sports games they release, I wouldn't mind a FEW catchy tunes tossed in there. I know a lot of people have praised the audio in this series due to the 'fun' of listening to a 'Disturbed' song one minute and then a classical music song the next, but I wasn't impressed. I wasn't impressed with this area in PGR 3 either, so it's not just this game.
I hope that Bizzare Creations really finds a way to shake this series up with the next game. And if they can't, I hope they stop making these games. It's not like this is not a quality game, but I got the feeling with PGR 4, that Bizzare was in 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' mode here. I know they restructured the career mode, but it's not any better and not much different. The addition of motorcycles was nice, but has minimal impact on the game itself. The weather effects are great, but I need more than that to get me to drop another $60 on a sequal. Bizzare Creations has created a great racing game series that manages to perfectly blend the arcade and 'sim' styles of racing, but the series is starting to feel stale. Hopefully the next game will change that feeling.