The two downloadable packs for Project Gotham Racing 4 are online, and… well, they’re online.
I was very disappointed, after downloading the free pack, to find out that the new “tourist mode,” which lets you roam the cities freely (it’s often been said that Bizarre Creations usually models an entire city area before deciding where the tracks will be, so all the data is in there), is only available as an online mode. I tried to plug a second controller, but the mode doesn’t seem to be available in local games; I tried to launch an online game by myself, but that didn’t work either.
I got over the limitations, though, when I finally tried it: once you’re dropped into the empty city, you’re mostly glad that there’s up to 7 other players in there — and it even makes sense as a game mode (the winner is determined based on the kudos score). I guess it’s okay that it’s online only (although it means non-Gold members won’t be able to take advantage of it at all), and it’s okay that it’s time-limited (to a maximum of 15 minutes), because… the cities are boring, really: unlike Test Drive Unlimited or Burnout Paradise that let you drive just about anywhere (well, not so sure about Burnout), the tourist mode is limited to the streets and roads that have been coded as track-able by Bizarre, and they’re all still enclosed in barriers — you’re not going to venture into parks and drive up a building’s stairs or down onto the beach. Which makes sense, really, because the game engine hasn’t been designed to handle the collisions between cars and the landscape, and changing that would have required a much bigger amount of reprogramming.
There are other game modes and challenges in the free and non-free DLCs, which I don’t care much about, and there are cars, too — the only one I really wanted, the old BMW M3, is downright ugly, and most of the other ones are in the low classes, so who cares really.
The lingering impression after I downloaded both those packs is definitely disappointment; the contents only get three stars because most is free, and the rest is cheap.
(There would have been an illustration if pgrnations.com hadn’t eaten the screenshot I uploaded from my console.)
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