Price: £44.99 Players: 1-8 (including online) Widescreen: Yes 60Hz: Yes (only) Dolby Digital 5.1 sound: Yes Xbox Live-enabled: Yes Dateline 2007: Project Gotham Racing 4, and fuck me if this doesn't wow you from 'minute one' with its opening CGI sequence to 'Shadow' by The Prodigy! Okay, let's get the basics out of the way because the chances are you've played a previous entry in this series and here the cars you get to try out include the 1957 Maserati 250F, 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray, 1978 Lamborghini Countach LP400, 1993 Toyota Supra Turbo and 2006 Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano. Also, for the first time ever, motorcycles from top manufacturers such as Ducati, BMW and Honda, are available to try out. That said, I found the bikes are a bugger to get to grips with since you don't realise with cars how the camera turns in opposite directions to your car and it's very disconcerting given the angles you can turn on a bike. whichever takes your fancy, though, damage to vehcles is still available in this game. There are gorgeous locations aplenty as usual, and you can drive round many cities throughout the world including Asia and North America, but my favourite came with St Petersburg - or Leningrad as it was when I visited in 1986, just two weeks before the Chernobyl incident (it wasn't my fault, honest!) - alongside the Neva River - or "Neeeva Reeeva" as our tour guide told us :)

I never got to play PGR3 but I can see in this release what I saw from footage of that, in that as you 'drive' into a crowd, they back off from the crash barrier. Excellent! :) In fact, the graphics have always improved throughout the releases in this series. Drive about, forget about looking at the track but just concentrate on your car. Check out the different angles so you can see the design and the reflections. Lovely. Soundwise, car games often leave a lot to be desired, but that's mainly because all you hear most of the time is the noise of an engine, however realistic they may have made it sound compared to the real beasts. And I still love to play this game to David Bowie's Never Let Me Down album, as I did in PGR2. I just wish I could add the playlist to the game itself like I could with back then, rather than having to fudge things by starting it in the Xbox 360 menu before running the game disc.

For the single player, the options begin with the Arcade mode, comprising of 10 segments with various little challenges, starting with Catch Me If You Can - set the level you want to achieve (1st/2nd/3rd) out of 4 cars and bikes and progress through the races, such as regular street races, 'One on One' which pits you against just one opponent that must be beaten and 'Eliminator' which is does exactly what it says on the tin, knocking out the last-placed car every 30 seconds until there can be only one... Beyond the arcade, there's Gotham Career, the obligatory career mode which is all about beating everyone else to win, Time Attack which puts the emphasis on speed and gives you all the options for cities, routes, the weather, your choice of vehicle, the option to have a ghost car onscreen and also whether to see just your best time or those of your ghost and friends as well. Once you're done you can save your best ghost and even upload it for others to see how well you've done (or badly, in my case). Finally, there's a Custom Match option in which to set every aspect of the game to suit.

PGR4 trailer: Nurburgring with snow I don't have Xbox Live Gold membership so haven't been online in a while, but although it was a brief time I've spent online in the past, it was a happy one, such as the time on the original Xbox when I happened across a bunch of French guys in Paris in a 'Chase the Rabbit' game of Midtown Madness 3, where I lost track of them a short while before but eventually caught up with them and just happened to be crossing a junction where the rabbit-holder was passing at 90-degrees and I caught the rabbit!! Cue a lot of "Zut alors!" from our friends across the Channel, and sensing that they were about to ditch me from their game I did the only thing I could to help aid the cause of international relations... I shouted, "Haw-he-haw-he-hawwwww!" and, unsurprisingly, I was banned from rejoining their game! A couple of other random points of note. The game includes a Photo mode, allowing you to take a picture for posterity with a moveable camera and upload to 'PGR on Demand'. In fact, just pausing the game mid-race to take a look at your surroundings, even from within the car, just goes to show how much detail there is in the game. Also, the Kudos points system is still here as any follower of the series would expect. On the downside, though, why does it have to reload in a race when I just want to restart it? It's so annoying as it takes ages to get going again. As always, it's best to note that this is not a rally-racing game and in PGR4, like the previous entries in the series, patience is its own reward and practice really can make perfect, leading to an experience in which you'll find yourself getting more and more into this release the more you play. At first, I found tracks with lots of tight corners really did my head in but, like I said, patience...

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2007.