Most drivers will jump right into solo career just to unlock those concept cars to use for online play too. Either way, almost everyone will be required to dabble about in solo mode for a while. Solo career races fall into the following categories:
Timed Events
- Hot Lap - Complete a single lap within a specified time.
- Timed Run - Beat a race before you run out of time.
- Breakthrough - Race through a series of checkpoints, and cross the finish line before time runs out. Each time you clear a checkpoint, time is added to the clock.
- Time vs. Kudos - Complete a circuit before time runs out. Earning Kudos stops the clock and buys you more time to get to the finish line.
Racing Events
- Street Race - A standard street race against multiple opponents.
- One on One - Two cars going head to head.
- Eliminator - A multiple lap race with the last racer being eliminated after each lap until one remains.
Style Events
- Cone Challenge - Do I hate these! Navigating through cones as quick as possible to finish the course.
- Drift Challenge - Earn a specific amount of Kudos by performing the longest drift possible on a short length of track.
- Overtake Challenge - Overtake a specified amount of cars inside the time limit.
- Speed Challenge - Hit a specific speed before driving past a speed camera.
As you can see, Solo career mode is feature packed with many race types so there should be something for everyone. Personally, I completely hated the cone challenges, which stopped me from completing quite a few tracks as I just couldn’t complete these events. I found solo career very enjoyable however as I was able to earn myself enough money to buy and amass an enormous collection of high-powered cars. Even more satisfying was the ability to move them from garage to garage, so I had one garage with my Ferrari collection of cars and another with my Ford collection.
These garages extend to more than just a storage area for your cars though, as you can literally ‘walk’ or ghost around your garage area and approach any car you wish and then use the photo editor to take photo’s of the car and apply various post processing effects to it. Sadly, these photo’s can only be saved to your hard drive and not an external USB memory stick, a feature Bizarre should have implemented. This would be a great way of allowing us to view our cars on our PC’s but instead, they reside on the hard drive or memory card with no direct way of extracting them, unless you buy an external data transfer kit that is. I have no idea if this situation has changed at present though.
You’ve no doubt seen me mention Kudos a few times now. Kudos measures the style, speed and skill during races. When you perform stylish moves during a race, you earn a certain amount of Kudos that is added to your total Kudos stash. After about 5 seconds of stable driving it is added to your Kudos bank, however, if you pull off another move before this happens then you will find yourself earning a Combo bonus. If you manage to hit an object before your stash moves to the bank, you lose the combo bonus completely, so be aware. Suffice to say that if you can chain link combos, the more Kudos you will rack up.
One complaint that I did have with PGR3 is the long track loading times, which almost shortened my daily game sessions with this title. I found load times just too lengthy as they approached 20-25 seconds when loading up a new track. Now, while I do appreciate the serious amount of data this game is throwing out, I just thought that this was too long and it made me enjoy the title much less.
