Looks great, but boring when it comes to the racing.
I had considered buying it along with the 360, but thought better of it and bought Need for Speed: Most Wanted instead. Turns out that I picked the right game. It’s not that PGR3 is a bad game; it’s just under developed.
GAMEPLAY
PGR has always been a combination of arcade and simulation style racing. I’m sure that kind of game play appeals to someone, but not a racing nut like me. PGR3 has about 80 licensed cars in it, and they’re all “super cars.” No racing Honda Civics here. This is both good, and bad. But I’ll get into that later.
The controls are very loose, and no matter what car you’re driving, they all handle pretty much the same. The Kudo system is back, and it encourages you to drift through corners. Thus resulting in a more arcade feel. But there’s no real purpose to the Kudo system other than unlocking new cars, and just for showing off. On the positive side, there are a wide varity of racing objectives to accomplish, and getting gold medals in all the events will keep some players coming back for more.
GRAPHICS
My jaw literally dropped when I first entered into the cockpit view of my Shelby GT500. Every car has a fully modeled interior, and it’s a sight to behold. Even the external cameras are nice because they give you a great view of the photo-realistic environments. It’s not all perfect, though. The lighting effects are nice, but the cars have very little in the way of reflections. This makes the cars look like flat plastic instead of shiny metal. There’s also damage modeling, but if you hit a wall head-on at 200mph you’ll only get a bent bumper, and it has no impact on the handling of the car.
SOUND
This is sort of a mixed bag. On one hand, the car engines sound great and very realistic. On the other hand, other sound effects didn’t get the same treatment. Collisions sound more like a paper bag filled with air popping than a metal-on-metal impact. The sound for Kudo points sounds almost identical to a collision, so I often couldn’t tell if I had hit the car I was trying to pass, or if I had gotten a bonus. The music is good, and blends classical with techno tracks, but its nothing that hasn’t been done before in better racing games like GT4.
VALUE
This is PGR3’s biggest problem. You can easily beat the single player game in one sitting. There’s no challenge to it, and because you start off racing high-end super cars there’s also no sense of accomplishment. The real draw here is the Xbox Live online racing, but you can only do so much of that without getting bored. There’s just no reason to race other than to improve your online ranking. PGR3 doesn’t have any form of car customization. No custom paintjobs, no after market parts. Once you buy a car, and choose its color, that’s the way it will be forever.
PGR3 is still fun to play, but I wouldn’t pay full price for it. It looks great, and it’s a great visual test of your HD setup with the 360. But there’s no lasting value to it. You can beat this game in about 6 hours, and the online play wont hold your interest for longer than a couple weeks at the most. My advice: rent it, and save your money for a real racing-sim like Forza Motorsport 2.