What is it they say about familiarity and contempt? Through a mixture of bottles with ‘XXX’ written on them and a childhood spent in solitary, we forget, but let’s look at the facts. Back in 2003, Project Gotham Racing 2 launched, boasting ten entirely fresh urban racing environments and the still fresh pleasure of online racing in a market still struggling to catch up. The gaming press was agog, and all was well in the world. Fast-forward to now, and what do we have? Four new cities, the removal of custom tracks altogether, and a bit of drizzle. Okay, so that’s not how the back of the box will dress it up, but the end result is much the same. What’s more, all of the nonracing bugbears that previously rubbed people up the wrong way remain, and without the sweet pill of visuals capable of removing lower jaw from rest of head, that’s quite a mountain to climb. Ironically enough, storm clouds began to appear on the horizon.

Let’s get the biggie out of the way first then. The inclusion of two-wheeled vehicles in addition to four is at best a partial success. While Bizarre’s decision seems totally ignorant of Xbox Live and the bowling match each race will turn into (a matter we’ll have to leave for another day, after we’ve had the chance for public play to prove the inevitable), even in single-player modes, problems occur. Last time around the undeniably lenient PGR handling mechanics may have been present and correct, but it was possible to imagine in your mind’s eye that some kindly illegal surgeon had simply replaced the tips of your toes for Michael Schumacher’s, say. Here, though, every time you drift around a hairpin bend, scrape your head against the corrugated barriers without so much as a flinch, or simply correct bad positioning by careering headlong into a fence, part of your inner biker dies. Yes, when everything comes together there’s something spectacularly graceful about two-wheeled cornering, but when things go pear-shaped everything turns into a whole heap of nonsense. Silhouettes of fallen rides being run over by onrushing cars, no opportunity to run back to your stricken ride Road Rash style, crashing into cars with your kneecap glued to the floor yet still managing to remain vertical – it seems like for every fly in the ointment, there’s another two ready to accompany it and form a grammatically pleasing sentence. Can’t have been deliberate, that.

As far as the single-player challenge goes, matters are broadly split straight down the centre into two halves – nominally titled ‘arcade’ and ‘career’. Essentially, there’s little difference between the two; both feature a succession of various event types, not all based upon the popular pursuit known as racing and the only difference being that arcade championships take place in the same location. So, you can expect your usual mix of Kudos tasks that force you to drive a car that’s worth hundreds of thousands of pounds around like it’s the BBC’s Playbus.

Some of these have been tweaked a little, however. For example, cone challenges are now refocused to place the emphasis on speed, knocking away time penalties for every gate missed rather than requiring a target amount of Kudos to be achieved. In our view, any focus upon speed rather than sliding all over the shops is an improvement. After all, when you’re forced to pull off what would otherwise be flashy tricks, where’s the fun in executing them in the first place? Regardless, anyone who has been holding out for a Gotham in which over 50 per cent of the events are races against AI opponents will have to find something else to occupy their time.

As for the new additions to Bizarre’s world tour, it’s again a case of both genius and disappointment in almost equal measure. While the undulating narrow alleyways of downtown Québec provide many a moment of pedal-to-the-metal, don’t-look-forward gaming, St Petersburg looks sparse and somewhat drab by comparison. Macau may sport a dodgy tree or two amid its misty, monsoon-drenched brilliance, but Shanghai has a practically identical neon glow to Tokyo, with all the track variety of version two’s Chicago. That is to say, not a lot. It’s certainly the kind of title that could be scored separately for newcomers to the series and everyone else, with some legitimacy.

How very English of us Right, that’s the end of the news, and now it’s time for the weather. No, you aren’t watching late afternoon television in the form of a magazine, but reading a discussion of Project Gotham’s real trump card – water, and lots of it. The PR blurb before release ran that pools of the stuff would lie about each track, building up and having subtle effects upon each race. We have no problems with endorsing this.

Taking part in a race during driving rainstorms – lack of water droplets on the camera aside – is perhaps the greatest thrill PGR 4 has to offer. When viewed from close range, and at a push from within each vehicle, standing liquid on the paintwork turns a healthy shine into a work of art. Sadly, the general rule of thumb that seems to run from this is your surroundings look a fair degree less exciting than in comparable peers (New York in Forza Motorsport 2 comes to mind) when they’re not soaked with the wet stuff. Tracks degraded to a washed-out grey mess, the most complicated aspects of building textures failing to load for what seems like forever, that kind of thing. What’s more, occasional frame rate issues drag the title from its lofty 60 frame-per-second perch whenever there’s a combination of spray and rain, plus too much in the way of opposition. It’s not a common occurrence by any means, but one that shouldn’t really be there at all.

While we may seem terribly down on Gotham right now, in reality that’s not the case – it just remains very saddening to see such a by-the-numbers sequel. We could hardly expect fresh thrills to match the introduction of Xbox Live and so many fresh tracks, but it’s sad to see the ability to create your own circuits wrenched away, especially after one of the chief complaints surrounding PGR 3 was the less-than-generous size of its cities. It’s a bit like settling into your most comfortable armchair and, before you realise it, being dragged into a giant recess behind its cushions, like that Mars advert a while ago. Stay with us. Way beyond the point where it’s too late to turn back, you find yourself behind the wheel of sports cars the like of which you’ll probably never even see in the flesh doing three-point turns and checking your rear-view mirror. Sure, the rewards are there through track packs, multiplayer modes and the like, but is the treat just around the corner worth all that time? We’d suggest not, and at this point we’ll stop, before we turn into a Seventies public-information film.

While we wouldn’t for a second wish violins to be drawn, serenading our tale of woe, the fact remains that reviewing Project Gotham Racing 4 feels like the most depressing exercise since Harry Potter last graced these pages. Why so? Well, for the benefit of anyone yet to experience the series’ last outing, we feel duty bound to award an eight. After all, the depth and diversity on offer here remain impressive, from a standing start. There are plenty of square miles of city to burn around, the fourwheeled vehicles handle competently and with clear difference between each one, plus there’s nothing outstandingly incompetent about either opponent AI or the career-scoring system.

However, it’s only as a committed fan of the series that cracks start to show. The last-minute livery system cobbled together as an answer to Forza 2’s more in-depth and thoroughly backed-up alternative, its environmental trump card being bested by Sega two weeks prior to release in the shape of Sega Rally and its extremely generous bike handling smashing your suspension of belief into tiny, almost imperceptible shards. Even the two-wheel physics aren’t as believable as they could have been, lying in some awkward middle ground between floating above the track and overwhelming with how much friction they provide.

That list could (and perhaps should) expand further into the realm of visuals and gameplay options, but there’s no need – we’re so certain that PGR has scraped into the higher echelons of 360 gaming by the tiniest fraction that if we marked out of a million it’d score exactly 800,000. Yeah – you heard us, and not a single digit more.

Dave Shaw