Multiplayer
Online career is a bit more involved, not to mention harder. The career mode uses your garages from solo career mode, so it does pay to purchase and familiarise yourself with the cars you have purchased. Needless to say that the more cars you have, the better your experience will be as you can partake in a greater range of races. Online career utilises TrueSkill system for rankings. What this means is that the game will try to match you against players of a similar TrueSkill rank so there is an even distribution of skill on any particular race you choose.
Taken from the PGR3 manual:
When you play PGR3 on Xbox Live, your performances and achievements are tracked and calculated to create your TrueSkill rating, which is used to determine your ranking among other Xbox Live racers worldwide. Your TrueSkill rating is designed to be a true measure of your PGR3 online driving skills and is used to match you up with similarly skilled players for online competition.
As your TrueSkill rating changes, so does the name associated with it. For example, you might start out as a newcomer, rookie or novice before working your way up to the rarefied world of the expert, master, Gotham hero and Gotham star.
You can select from many preset online championships and TrueSkill will always match you up with other Xbox Live racers with similar ratings too. The online side of PGR3 is superb and extremely enjoyable, however upon release most gamers found that Ferrari’s were grossly overused and on almost every single track that you would try online, they’d be dominated by scarlet Ferrari’s. This really put me off this title completely, as player created racers for the lower end vehicles were very rare. Racing online can be very tense, especially on the Nuburgring F1 track with its wide track and run off areas. If you are nervous, or are behind the wheels of a high-powered car then one mis-twitch of that wheel will send you flying off course onto the sandy gravel trap. I spent a lot of time here! Online can be like real life karting with its bumper-to-bumper action, where one knock from a rival will send you flying off the track.
PGR3 also has a superb Route Creator, which allows you to design your own custom tracks. You firstly choose a city, and then use the control pad to select start and finish points, and then various street segments which you can bind together to create a full circuit. You can create short sprint circuits or even huge ones and once finished, you can save them to the hard drive or even your memory card to transfer to another 360.
One of the most impressive features of PGR3 has to be Gotham TV. This is a TV channel that allows you to watch your friends race. In addition the Heroes channel broadcasts live races featuring the world’s best PGR3 players competing in ranked Xbox Live events. Players who are shown here are considered to be amongst the most elite players on Xbox Live This a really good way of picking up racing pointers, and seeing how the pro’s take difficult corners at high speeds. Gotham TV is one of my favourite features and I spotted many of my friends on it during random occasions when I decided to check the heroes channel.
As for multiplayer lag, what lag? The netcode in this title is of such quality that I never ever had a single issue playing the game over Xbox Live, although I did spot a few of our American cousins complaining of it. PGR3 is the only title I’ve seen to make superb use of Xbox Live.
Visuals/Audio
Well you’ve seen the in-game screenshots above, so there is no doubting that this is the most stunning, realistic looking racer at present. The graphics technology behind PGR3 is outstanding. For most early 360 adopters, this was one of the first titles ever played on the 360 and it left most gasping for breath the moment they got into a race. Photo realistic cars, the most detailed gorgeous surroundings and fun racing. Bizarre promised gamers that their pre-release screenshots on their website would be faithfully replicated in the game and they lived up to that promise.
The cars look incredible and are immensely detailed and they have tremendous detail when viewed close up. Not only do they look good but also the graphics engine moves everything so fluidly at a constant 30 frames per second without any frame rate drops whatsoever. There just wasn’t any stuttering at all, it’s just smooth fluid racing without any frame rate drops amongst other detailed cars in detailed surroundings.