This is Project Gotham Racing which is really Metropolis Street Racer 2 which was released for the Dreamcast about a year ago now, but I'm not here to talk about why the games called what it is I'm here to talk about what the game is like. What I've just said is true in many aspects this is Metropolis Street Racer 2 but renamed(they obviously didn't want to keep the reputation of the Dreamcast on their back!!). Everything is there; the 3 accurately modelled cities: London, Tokyo and a new city for the X-Box: New York, which means more effort has gone in this game than a simple near Dreamcast conversion.

The Bizarre Creations team has had to go and accurately model New York, which is a job in itself(especially with the terrible events last year). But the cities look beautiful, there's none of that slight glitchyness the Dreamcast version had everything is up to X-Box graphical standard especially the cars they now look sleek and shiny as ever! From muscle cars to the ever cool saloon type cars.

Tracks are nicely modelled as I've said and are challenging if not quite hard for the average gamer you can get anything from slight corners to absolute hairpins so you'll be bound for some great, challenging driving. One of the great things this game boasts is of course if you live in one of the featured cities you can have thrill of speeding along at 60m.p.h plus without being fined! The Kudos rating system has really been thought about this time, last time you were given kudos based on style, skill and mistakes.

This time you are given the Kudos as you play the game i.e. if you pull off a brilliant powerslide around a long corner: Kudos ahoy! But if you hit the walls/crash whilst doing that powerslide you lose all that Kudos, so Kudos is handed out separately for each bit of good driving you do. If you can carry on your good driving the Kudos will rise and eventually if you pull 2 good corners off in quick succession and you'll start building up combos!

The game is very smooth and has a similar type play to the Dreamcast version but Project Gotham has a different feel to it. The controls play differently; using the control pad is all very well but to get the full potential out of this game you'll need a steering wheel, quite frankly it can be very hard to control your car with a normal gamepad, when I first played this I had no idea what the controls where and found myself using a handbrake turn instead of breaking but maybe that's just me being an idiot! Never the less Project Gotham still remains slightly 'iffy' to control; cornering is harder and the combination of control pad makes the balance of acceleration and braking extremely sensitive too which unfortunately means you have to be quite experienced with racing games to play your way through this game without any frustration.

Project Gotham has lots of cars, hundreds of tracks between the 3 cities and graphics that would make Jeremy Clarkson need a bucket to catch all his drool.Unless you have a steering wheel it makes the game such a lighter load, although a steering wheel obviously makes the driving experience better. But that's not to say you don't have to invest in a steering wheel because of this game, sure it'd make the gameplay better but with a standard control pad Project Gotham is a challenging racer, no doubt about that. Something to give GT3 a bit of challenge!