Metropolis Street Racer

As a big fan of the Project Gotham Racing series I had wanted to try this out for a long time. I'm pleased to say I wasn't disappointed.

The Kudos system is here and while it isn't as developed as in later instalments it still adds that extra element to the gameplay. Much like PGR1, you get to adjust the targets and difficulty for each race to your own personal preference with a higher difficulty yielding more bonus kudos points, which are used to progress through the game.

There is a decent variety of race types including street race, one on one, hot lap, timed run, split speed etc. Most of these would find their way into the sequel games and be expanded on. There's a lot to like here; there's a nice range of cars to drive (I always like looking back at car rosters in older games as you tend to find models which are now completely forgotten) and the driving and handling feels good though it does feel rather odd how cars are incapable of getting any air - particularly evident while driving up and down the steep slopes of San Francisco.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about MSR is how this is one of the first driving games to let you drive through the streets of real cities, which in this case have been painstakingly and meticulously built up after developers mapped-out the real-life streets of San Francisco, London and Tokyo. The attention to detail is fantastic and additonally the time of day will change in game to reflect whatever time you have your Dreamcast set at and while this is an interesting idea, it does usually mean you'll find yourself driving around during nightfall in a lot of races and personally I'm not a big fan of driving around in the dark.

The biggest detriment to MSR and why it isn't quite on the same level as the follow up games in the PGR series is in how it seems to punish replayability. You get the option to replay races in order to try and improve on the amount of Kudos points earnt however should you perform worse or fail the challenge, you will be deducted Kudos points. There's no retry once you enter a race or challenge either, so if you want to restart then you'll have to exit, get penalised for abandoning the race then select the race again to re-enter. That adds up to a lot of time wasting and loading screens as you play through the game.

As if that wasn't punishing enough, despite the game consisting of around 40 cars for you to drive, MSR discourages you from switching around cars too much. Your garage has limited space and swapping out a car to free up a spot will see the game punish you by taking away a fraction of the Kudos points you earned in that car. It's nice to have a bit of challenge but design choices like this are baffling to me and just seem to take away from the freedom and enjoyment of being able to drive these cars around these iconic roads.

Despite my reservations, MSR is still one of the best racing games on Dreamcast. It was one of the earliest games to show us what the 6th generation of gaming could bring to the racing genre and evolved into one of my favourite racing franchises in Project Gotham Racing. Future titles would iron out some of the shortcomings found here but it's still worth going back to revisit MSR if you're a fan of the series.