Being a big fan of PGR3, despite being a lousy driver, I was definitely looking forward to Project Gotham Racing 4. The addition of bikes was cool when I heard about it last week, but didn't seem like anything totally revolutionary to me. But if you take the bikes and combine them with all the changes to the game engine, PGR4 seems to be changed just enough so that people who have the previous version will want to grab the new version as well.

Compared to PGR3, 4 has twice the number of locations, improved graphics, and of course, bikes. The focus is on "you" being the star, so you customize your character's profile with stuff like your country so that you can participate in regional competitions online. Each region then goes on to send their best to world competitions, which will crown a world champion PGR player in the end. Pretty neat.

The environmental effects are definitely something to notice. There's rain, snow, ice, and even puddles on the ground, all affecting your driving. The snow and rain change your car's exterior to a have a "rain" effect, but the real interesting view is the cockpit view. When you're inside the car, you can see the water go up the windshield and around the side windows. Looks quite realistic, and should spice up the cockpit view enough that you'll want to be inside even with the decreased visibility.

As for bikes, the developers are trying to make them as "Project Gotham" as possible. Which is to say, more arcadey and less realistic in the effort to keep things fun. You can bump and grind into other bikes and cars, but if you go too hard or ram into a wall at the wrong angle you'll fall off and have to get back on.

You can play your career mode on either a bike or a car, and most races will have at least one bike to give everything a nice mix. So bikes are definitely in there in a big way. We asked how the racing wheel will work on bikes (it works fine on cars), but the PR referee chimed in and said they didn't have anything to say about that at this time.

Other cool things are volumetric fog—which you can actually get up and over in parts of levels—the presence of arcade mode like in PGR2, party and team races in online modes, regional championships, Gotham on Demand (a YouTube-like system to share and view video recordings of races), and "left of center" achievements.

Oh, and there isn't going to be a Geometry Wars Galaxies in this game, but there is going to be something along those lines.