Xbox 360 owners really are spoilt for choice when it comes to racing games: DiRT, PGR3, Forza 2, The NFS games, and recently Juiced 2, plus many more coming in the following months. Unless you're a complete driving fanatic, it becomes a little bit of a tough crossroads when trying to determine exactly which title to spend your hard-earned on.

PGR4 hits the tarmac with all four wheels spinning as soon as you fire it up. Slick opening menus immediately guide you through the creation of an avatar, with whom you'll tackle the task of becoming the world's best driver. If this sounds a bit daunting, it is. The long road to the top of the ladder will take several seasons, and it's this change in career structure that is perhaps PGR4's biggest innovation. Those of you who played Top Spin will be familiar with the act of choosing particular events in each month, then becoming good enough to qualify for special invitationals and the like. PGR4 follows this style, with all of the amateur events initially available but none of the more professional ones unlocked until you prove yourself. Tied to this is a strong philosophical shift for the Project Gotham series. No longer do you actually fail events (apart from online and arcade challenges). It's all about Kudos and career points, so if you come third or fourth, you won't actually have to race the event again, you'll simply get less points and your long climb up the ladder will thus be slower.

Cross the line first consistently and you'll not only get Kudos bonuses and open up harder events, you'll also be given special opportunities to participate in invitationals (which themselves may require that you race to qualify). If you do win one of these special events you'll unlock extra vehicles, races and other perks. Also interesting is the fact that you can choose not to partake in these if you feel that you're not quite up for the challenge, in which case they're saved for next season, assuming that you maintain or improve on your rank.

This is quite a shift from the previous games, and makes for a more dynamic and personalised experience. If you're constantly winning, then you can amp up the difficulty or take on the pro challenges, or if you're experiencing just the right amount of challenge you can continue your slow but steady rise to the top of the pile by only entering the amateur events (which net you less career points). At certain times during the (in-game) year, you may be able to participate in Majors, which can vary in structure from Knockout tournaments where you compete against seven other racers in a series of heats, through to Global Cup Tournaments, where only the winner of a street race against your own countrymen will be sent to represent your nation. The new career mode is, quite frankly, much more engaging and fluid, and it really feels like Bizarre Creations has gone to a lot of effort to cater for individual preferences.

As mentioned, Kudos points still play a big role in the game, more so than in PGR3. Every single thing in the game is tied to Kudos, be it vehicle purchases, special unlocks or rankings. To this end, Bizarre have introduced the new Kudos Stars system. Perform stylish moves to earn Kudos and the star system will kick in as you start to string longer and longer moves together (you get a star approximately every 100 Kudos points). These give you nice big bonuses to help bolster your Kudos total so you can spend, spend, spend. Arcade events are where you'll be racking these up, with heaps of events available for you to try and get that coveted Gold or Platinum medal. The arcade mode is broken up into speed events (super cone sprint, breakthrough, hot lap, speed challenge, time vs. Kudos), racing events (eliminator, street race, one-on-one, overtake), and style events (cone attack, Kudos challenge). Really, there's something for everyone here.

For the first time ever in a PGR4 game, bikes have been included, so do they work? The answer to that is not so black and white. PGR4 is an arcade racer, so you shouldn't expect realism at all. It's all about slides, spins, wheelies and endos, so the bikes handle in a way that is immediately accessible but ultimately quite shallow. Quick off the mark but with lower top speeds, bikes are great for winding course but not so great for straight ones. It is fun to pop wheelies and perform stunts and there are some really cool, and cheeky, animations that come from the rider when overtaking vehicles, but in the end the bikes still handle almost like cars, which again is tied to the arcade approach of the series. Maintaining a long stretch of Kudos is pretty difficult on a bike, but they are great for getting in front of the pack and staying there.

In terms of tracks, all of the previous cities return in this iteration, with the inclusion of new locations such as Shanghai, St. Petersburg, Macau and Quebec. Graphically, the game is very nice, with noticeable improvement on the smoothness of textures. Crowd animations are pretty average but this is made up by the inclusion of some fantastic dynamic weather effects which, with the new career system, is the biggest new addition to the series. Throughout your races you'll experience fog, rain, ice and even snow, all of which affect your driving experience greatly. In fog, it's difficult to see, so you need to keep an eye on the mini-map, and in the rain you'll end up slipping and sliding all over the place if you don't double check braking distances.

The photo mode has returned yet again – man, what game doesn't have a photo mode these days? The inclusion of dynamic weather certainly makes for some awesome rain-slicked photo opportunities, which are uploaded to pgrnations.com for you to peruse, save and share. Perhaps the best option in the game, and one that permeates all of your top scores and times, is that you can at any time check out what your friends have been doing, where they're ranked and what Kudos they earned on each race. This creates a social ambience that is quite welcome.

With so much ‘stuff' in the game, I guess the only criticisms that I have are tied to the opponent AI and the fact that the game still seems like a bit of a rehash. Unfortunately, the opponent AI just doesn't seem to react that well to your presence on the track. They will try and overtake and cut you off and such, but only half-heartedly, and it really does feel like you're racing against pre-defined AI lines all of the time. They rarely, if ever, stuff up (unless you're able to give them a bump here and there), so if you find yourself at the back of the field you can pretty much resign yourself to never catching up. Granted, there's none of that annoying rubber-band difficulty at play, but you will definitely get frustrated on the higher difficulties when you make one tiny mistake and that ruins your chances for the rest of the race. The other sticking point is that almost half of the game is a repeat of what we've seen before, the same cities and tracks, the same kind of challenges and so on. Part of what always makes me shake my head with driving games is how even the tiniest incremental changes to, say, a track or type of vehicle can then justify a brand new game, which is essentially the same as the last one.

That said, PGR4 is better than 3, it feels smoother and more in line with what you want to do with your time. The inclusion of bikes is nice, but not really astounding; ditto for the new Kudos Stars and career structure. It is, however, just darn fun – and no other word can really describe it. Whereas Forza 2 quickly got boring because of its almost dreary link to reality, PGR4 is great for a quick fang, maybe an online race and then a few piccies to show your mates.