When the game starts, you have to prove yourself as a racer and earn a place on one of the lower teams within the TOCA racing circuit. From then on, you’ll race on the tracks, and also keep track of Ryan’s career. The more victories or placements you score, the more email you’ll receive requesting your presence on better teams. Join a better team and you get a better car and pit crew. Better teams will require that you race better, and they won’t feel bad about tossing you off the team if you turn out to be a total dog of a driver.

The basic driving controls are almost exactly what you’d see in any other racer; with the left stick or d-pad controlling direction, and the buttons controlling acceleration, braking, handbrakes and the camera views. If you’re driving a manual shift, you can use the R1 and L1 triggers for gear shifting. One thing you’ll really enjoy about this game is the in-car view, which looks better than anything I’ve ever seen in any platform’s racing games. I’m a stickler for driving using the in-car view, but most games make it painful to the point of being offensive with their lack of in-car detail, but not Pro Race Driver, which offers a solid in-car experience.

When you’re not racing, you’ll be handling your career from the HQ. Within the HQ, you can view maps of the tracks, read your email, or head out to the drivers’ lounge to relax between races. Email is very important, since that’s how you will receive offers to join new teams. Ignore your email, and you won’t go very far in your career.

Along with the breaks that stick you in the HQ, there are also short cut-scenes which walk you through the continuing saga that is Ryan McKane’s life. You’ll get tongue-lashings from your manager when you do poorly, cheers when you do well, and other characters will appear to flesh out Ryan’s life. The cut-scenes lend an immersive, more storybook-ish feel to the game. You’ll actually look forward to cut-scenes as they function as a sort of progress marker for how well you’re doing in the game.

Before any race, you’ll need to visit the garage to configure your car. Each car handles differently, and likewise each track offers different challenges for the drivers. During your trip to the garage, your coach will offer advice on what options you should configure on your vehicle, and which you should leave alone. For example, in tracks with plenty of turns, your coach will suggest additions that increase the down force on your vehicle (spoilers for example) Other times, he might suggest you leave the vehicle as it is. It’s up to you to decide whether you take his advice or not, but until you’ve become an advanced racer, it’s a safe bet to pay close attention to him. After you’ve made your adjustments, you can take the car out for test drives around the track, which let you get a feel for the track, and the tweaks you’ve installed on your car.

When you’re in a race, things get insanely realistic. Driver AI is strong, and your opponents will do whatever they have to, including bashing up your car, to get past you and win the race. Speaking of bashing, the damage effects in the game are simply amazing. Unlike most titles, where you get bashed up to no other effect but the aesthetic, damage in Pro Race Driver will directly influence your racing abilities and indirectly effect your opponents' racing results. Let’s say you get in a real fender bender on a hairpin turn, and you lose your rear bumper and do some damage to your right rear tire. Well, you’ll leave that bumper on the track, and woe be to the racer who runs over that bumper, as they’ll suffer minor tire damage. And that blowout you had on the right rear tire? Well, you can expect your handling to suffer, and acceleration will be more difficult.

Thankfully, you can pull into the pits and let your crew repair damage to a certain degree. The pits can be tricky, however, since they introduce a whole new level of strategy into the game. When you pull into the pits, you’re shown a meter that tells you how many seconds you have to spend in the pits to repair damage. You can adjust the meter to spend less time in the pits, but that means you have to decide which repairs are more important to you as you must maintain the balance between pit time and vehicle repairs. If you don’t have a huge lead, you won’t have time to sit in the pits fixing all those broken spoilers and blown tires. You’ll only get a quick visit for a some band-aid fixes and you’ll have to just hope you can finish the race that way.

Then there are the tracks, which are of course modeled after 38 real-world tracks. Don’t expect any mercy on these tracks, as even the simplest looking ones can offer hidden challenges that will test your technical ability behind the wheel. Many a time I found myself skidding off the side of the track due to underestimating the need for deceleration before a seemingly shallow turn.

Graphics
The graphics in Pro Race Driver are hodgepodge of good and bad. The cars look pretty good with nice paint details and outstanding reflections, and the damage looks fantastic, but the tracks are very jagg and the crowds lifeless. There are a lot of big, chunky polygons in use in Pro Race Driver environments, which detract a bit from the overall graphical quality of the game. With all the great physics and gameplay, you would hope they could pull off some amazing graphics throughout the game, but instead, they vary from really good to really poor.

The racers’  HQ and garage graphics are very poor. They are jaggy and dull to the point of being PSOne quality. I can’t understand why they didn’t spend a little time polishing up the static graphics for these rooms, after all, they didn’t have to work on any animation for these rooms, it’s just a guy sitting in a chair or three guys standing around a car in the garage ! While it certainly doesn’t ruin the game, it does annoy me that you can go from racing in a great looking car interior camera mode to having to hang out in a clunky, chunky HQ while waiting for the next race.

Sound
There’s not much of a soundtrack to Pro Race Driver, most of the music will be heard when you’re sitting around the HQ, and comes in the form of some classic rock tunes. During the races, you won’t hear much music, which is too bad, since it would be great to race to some of the classic rock tunes Codemasters licensed for the game.

Vehicle sounds are par for the course, that is, they sound about as realistic as possible for a gaming console. Squealing brakes, popping exhaust and roaring throttles all sound as they should in a racing title. Nothing here is Earth-shattering, but it’s not bad either.

Replayability
With 42 cars, 38 tracks and 13 championship series to race in, you’re going to be hard pressed to become bored with this game. Since the career mode is based upon making choices as you play, you can go through the game over and over again, choosing to join different teams and having a completely different gaming experience every time.

If you tire of racing the AI, Pro Race Driver offers up a great multiplayer split-screen mode so you can tear up the the track with your buddies. It's too bad they didn't build in an online component for the game, but maybe we'll see it in a later version, or in Codemaster's upcoming Colin Mcrae Rally III.

To wrap it up, if you’re a racing fan, Pro Race Driver will delight you in its attention to detail and its storyline. While the standard arcade-racing fan might not like its depth of gameplay, most other players will get plenty of enjoyment from this game.