I also picked up Project Gotham Racing 4 and got a chance to put some time into it tonight. As far as the racing itself is concerned, it feels pretty much like how I remember PGR3 did, just with a prettier engine. There is plenty of new stuff on top of that, though.

There are a handful of new and different types of vehicles this time around, including motorcycles, open wheel cars, LMP-style prototypes, and some lower-end, slower cars, whereas PGR3 was pretty much entirely high-end sports cars. There aren’t separate classes or races for them either, so you can be racing a bike, an open wheel car, and a muscle car against each other at the same time, which would be suicidal in real life.

There are some new track environments of course, including Quebec City, Macau, St. Petersburg, and Shanghai. I haven’t seen a lot of all of them yet, but it’s nice to have the variety. The Quebec City ones I’ve seen so far tend to be extremely twisty.

The other big new feature is weather effects such as rain, fog, and snow during races. I’m not sure how much of a difference the rain is really making so far, aside from the impressive graphical effect, but the snow was definitely a challenge in the one race I’ve seen it in so far.

They also changed the championship career structure. Instead of simply having a list of events that unlock as you get a certain number of medals, you follow an event calendar, skipping to the next event date on the calendar as you complete each one. The events can be a traditional multi-race series event, or an invitational event where you can win a new vehicle. So far I’ve won the events for the Jaguar D Type and Maserati 250F, but just barely failed the one for the Subaru Impreza 22B.

And that’s the downside of this new championship structure — if you fail an event, the calendar proceeds anyway and you can’t retry it again until it rolls around to it again on the next year. I’m doing reasonably well at the silver medal level of difficulty, but I’m reluctant to try a more difficult one since if I don’t do well at it, that’ll be a handful of events that I won’t even be able to retry at a lower difficulty for a while.

It may still be a lot like PGR3 at heart, but the new stuff makes it worth it. I always like to have more variety available in my racing games, rather than focusing on a very narrow selection.