I find the whole going at speed thing rather cathartic, really. I’ve spent more time than I care to remember wasting away in the midst of traffic jams or being held up on a dual carriageway by some 40-something divorced woman driving her son the 900 yards from her front door to football practice in her four-wheel drive. I’ve spent far too long doodling around inner-city 20mph limits. Heck, I’ve wasted precious seconds of my life queuing in car parks whilst some old dear performs a 1,456-point turn to get their Micra into a space wide enough to fit Jeremy Clarkson’s arse. Going slow and getting held up is boring.

Hence, a Project Gotham game is always something to be celebrated in my part of town. I’m never going to be able to afford an Enzo, a McLaren F1 or even an Aston DB9, but thanks to the chaps at Bizarre I have been able to slide them around street and road circuits like a complete lunatic for over half a decade now. As well as saving me from costing myself the entire GDP of the United States in repair bills, it’s also provided a heck of a lot of hours of gameplay, be it scrabbling around London in a Porsche Cayenne in number two or delicately painting a mesmerising path through the myriad corners of the Nordschleife in a McLaren F1 in number 3. Project Gotham is Matt, and Matt is Project Gotham.

Yet, initial moments spent with number four left me confused and – dare I say it – disappointed. Bizarre have made the biggest switch from one game to the next the series has seen to date, completely doing away with the medal system of before and introducing motorbikes into the mixture, much to many peoples’ unease in the last few months. Added to this are plenty of new cities, a few new types of challenges and weather effects, giving this latest title a greater distinction from its predecessors than either of the last two titles. Whilst playing Project Gotham 3 felt like slipping into a comfy pair of shoes once again, 4 feels like wearing a brand new pair of jeans.

Foremost of the changes has to be the inclusion of everyone’s favourite traffic-hoppers, motorbikes. In previous interviews with the Bizarre team they stressed that they would handle in a more arcade fashion than anything, and this is indeed the case. Clatter into anything at top speed and you’re likely to tumble down the road, but other than that your rider will stay on his saddle for the most part. Control is another issue, mind, with initial experiments seeing you veer wildly around and make a complete mess of the corners. Instead of earning kudos in the standard car manner with slides and such (although this is still possible), you gain points for performing stunts and tricks on your bike.

Problem is, they just don’t seem as fun to control as the cars. Whereas ragging the living daylights out of a Lambo or Ferrari reduced me to the kind of silly grin you’d imagine most petrolheads to have playing this kind of game, riding the bikes often became somewhat frustrating and can end up being a game of motorised pinball if the opposition cars get themselves wedged in the way. The good thing about the way the career works is that you don’t actually necessarily have to ever ride the bikes (there is a bike-only arcade section, mind), so if they’re not your slice of cheese then you can keep to four wheels throughout the career mode.

Ah, the career mode. Those expecting to waltz on in and start earning those silver, gold and platinum medals might want to prepare for a bit of a shock, as this time around the whole thing revolves around a calendar system. You can change the level of difficulty from a separate menu within the mode, but for the main portion of proceedings you will be taking part in championships, earning kudos and spending it on new cars, circuit packs for multiplayer and various other things. Strangely, buying these items themselves is an option located not even within the career menu system, requiring you to return to the main menu.

Initially, all this makes the whole thing seem more than a little disjointed. The challenges themselves remain mostly the same apart from a few new additions (bumping cones over in some sort of circuit-based ten pin bowling being one of them), but the initial stages see you flit between classes and circuits rather quickly. After a couple of hours play I sat back, rested the controller on my knee and felt somewhat puzzled. Half of my brain wanted to love the game for, at its core, being the same, tail-happy fun that Project Gotham games have always been. On the other hand, the career mode just didn’t feel particularly immersive and I was struggling to really crack it.

A couple of hours later and everything had just clicked. You see, getting used to the changes in the game – the weather, the bikes, the career progression – will take time, but once you get your head around it then you suddenly realise that it’s good ol’ Project Gotham, with some intense races, kudos challenges and time trials all waiting for you to tackle them. It’s packaged and presented in a different way, granted, but its heart still beats to the same rhythm: zipping around city circuits in highly powered vehicles against the clock and other racers. As previously, it’s also highly enjoyable.

Adding to the fun are the weather effects, which turn what would otherwise have been an ultra-grippy road surface into something resembling a skidpan. Almost perversely, one of the initial challenges buried within the career mode is to navigate your way around a full lap of the Nordschleife in a 1950s Maserati 250F Formula One car in the snow, which is akin to having to skateboard around a rollercoaster on a bar of soap.

At this point you’ll start exploring the many cities and circuits on offer, and this time around there’s a heck of a lot to play with. People who loved Las Vegas, London et al in the previous title will no doubt be jolly to see them returning this time around with a bunch of new circuit layouts, whilst at the same time newcomers Shanghai, St. Petersburg and Quebec lend their unique architecture to various street circuits and Macau offers players the chance to squirm their way around the maniacally twisty, narrow street circuit that hosts a yearly motosport festival. Another point to note this time around is that the circuit design seems much more solid, with some particularly memorable efforts slotted in for players to conquer.

When you’re all done with the career mode, other options exist for you to burn rubber in. Arcade mode presents you with much the same as before, with ten chapters. Each chapter challenges you to gain medals of varying colour, and to make things more varied you have to do half the medal winning in a car and half on a bike. There’s plenty to plough through and the more thorough of you will no doubt spend an age ticking off those platinum medal scores, so the arcade mode alone offers at least a dozen extra hours of offline play.

When it comes to taking things online, PGR4 tweaks itself to once again provide one of the best online racing experiences on the market. Out goes the Project Gotham TV idea that allowed players to watch some of the world’s best (and me, as it turned out) joust, replaced by the brand spanking new PGR On Demand feature that allows you to upload your best replays and photos for other folks to gawp at and rate. Nicely slotted into all this is the ability to snap your most epic moments and upload them to a website from which you can save and spread them around the internet to your heart’s content, matching what Forza 2 and Halo 3 have given us prior.

The best bit of all, thankfully, is that the racing itself is pretty much lag-free and easy-as-pie to get into. Heading online sees you presented with a number of championships to select from, upon doing which you are then plopped straight into a lobby and matched with players who have acquired similar rankings to you in previous races. It’s quick, it’s easy and as ever it’s brilliant fun, which can only add to the value of the game as a whole.

Then there’re the frills around the edges – the graphical prowess and sheer bliss of revving engines roaring out of your speakers. Whilst still being locked at 30fps, PGR4 still moves slickly and now has actual fans standing by the side of the road whilst you race by, thus alleviating the slight post-apocalyptic feel that previous titles provided with their empty streets. The cars themselves still look gorgeous, the cities all have distinguishing landmarks scattered around (blasting past Piccadilly Circus mere minutes after having nearly been run over by a taxi there was a curious feeling), and the weather effects leave pleasing smears and splashes all over the windscreens.

The soundtrack’s not half bad either, with Bloc Party, My Chemical Romance, Lilly Allen and a whole host of other artists that the kids are down with these days bundled in for good measure. Best of all, though, is the soundtrack provided by the roaring of the cars themselves as you tear through the gears. Turning the speakers right the way up and flooring the throttle of your Enzo along the main straight of the Nordschleife is fantastically pleasing to the ears, and something that sends one of those almost-geeky shivers down any car-lover’s spine.

Hence, PGR4 has actually ended up being as good for me as PGR3. Despite the initial niggles with the career modes and the lack of enthusiasm on my part for the bikes, the new challenges, cars, cities and the excellent online mode make this the best version of Project Gotham to date. With the added bonus of a brand-new Geometry Wars game (Waves, which sees your opponents attack… er, in waves) and the ability to snip and post your career highlights for the whole world to see, this has the potential to be firmly wedged into your 360s this winter and beyond, no matter what the excellent-looking release schedule throws our way.