The Midtown Madness series has always been successful at creating a feel of madcap racing in and around urban enviroments. The PC games never restricted your movements throughout the city. Even where there was a course defined, you could bust through the barriers and make your own shortcuts. Combined with a diverse assortment of vehicles and a quirky sense of humor, the games really were a blast to play both online and off, and they made a name for Angel Studios. Now the series has moved to Xbox, courtesy of veteran developers Digital Illusions, who are making their freshman effort at this sort of game. Can they continue the Midtown Madness legacy? At first glance, the game looks promising enough. It lets you take out up to 34 diverse vehicles – cars, trucks, even buses and fire engines – on two cities, Paris and Washington. The single player game modes on offer will be familiar to veteran Midtown Madness players – Checkpoint races pit you against up to seven other drivers to see who can get to all the checkpoints first. Blitz races are the same, except your opponent is the clock, and if you want to explore the city without any pressure, there’s Cruise mode. The game also includes a campaign mode called ‘Work Undercover’ in which you must complete several missions to help solve a pair of high-profile crimes. Oddly, there is no race mode in which you have to hit all of the checkpoints in order. This might seem like a minor nitpick, but it hints at the biggest problem the game suffers from as a whole: the game lacks depth and character. This is the third installment of the series, but it feels like a debut effort. The problems start with the driving and collision physics models. It has a very arcadey feel, with the cars able to whip around corners at breakneck speed, stop almost on a dime and hit 200MPH with laughable ease. Your car also powers its way through other vehicles, flipping them left and right like some demented snowplow. Even the FLE – the smallest vehicle in the game – can go toe-to-toe with a big SUV and come out nearly unscathed. Lampposts, mailboxes, fences, garbage cans, everything practically moves out of the way, with minimal impact on your vehicle’s forward momentum. About the only things that can stop your car dead in this game are buildings, trees, subway cars and wrought iron fences. Definitely fun to be sure, but as a result the game is a lot less challenging than previous games in the series. Traffic winds up merely being a minor irritation, instead of the dynamic game element it could be, especially since the overly forgiving physics engine makes it trivial to avoid traffic and other obstacles. Instead, some of the challenge comes from the clock and the other racers. The game adapts itself to match the car you choose. Pick a slow car such as a City Bus, and your competitors will choose similar vehicles such as the fire engine and you’ll also get more time to complete a Blitz race. This lends an element of strategy to the car selection; your choice of car will depend on the nature of the course rather than the choices of the AI drivers or the amount of time you have, though if you are going for course records, you need to pick the faster cars. Sometimes this system doesn’t work too well; in one race I was getting beaten consistently by opponents who were in much better cars than me, so I switched to the Cement Truck, and the AI opponents picked the Freightliner Century Cab. Almost right off the bat I was able to open up a massive lead and handily win the race. Your Checkpoint opponents are actually pretty sedate. They are quite adept at avoiding other traffic and negotiating corners, yet they are also very slow in all but a handful of races. As soon as you learn the course and where the shortcuts are, you will find it very easy to win. The Blitz clock also seems to be dialled a little too easy, with a few practice runs being all that is needed to beat most courses, and the rest can usually be beaten by picking a different car. When all is said and done, the Blitz and Checkpoint modes are very shallow. There is no championship points ladder; you simply must win every race to advance – second place is not enough. Even more disappointingly, both cities have only ten Blitz and ten Checkpoint races each, and after you’ve completed all of them, there is very little incentive to go back except to chip away at the course records. These are cities. Surely they can come up with more courses. The real meat of the single-player game is the Work Undercover mode, which charges you to perform 27 missions in each of the two cities. The missions range from picking up and dropping off passengers, tailing cars, ramming other cars into submission and some straight races against colleagues or rivals. Unfortunately most of the missions devolve into simple Checkpoint-style races with a bit of Crazy Taxi flair thrown in, and as with the other race types, most of the missions are too easy to beat. There are a few quirky missions towards the end, such as one where you must use your relatively slow police cruiser to track down and collide with four joyriders in high-performance sports cars. But even that isn’t really very good, since all you have to do is memorize the movements of each car and work out where to be to take them out, which is a lot easier than it sounds. And those missions are few and far between, lost in a sea of glorified checkpoint and blitz ‘missions’. But perhaps the worst part of the game is its character. Older games in the series had a quirky, almost dark sense of humor about themselves. They were always about fun, and finding the most interesting ways to tear through the cities. Above all, they never took themselves seriously. Races had you making insane jumps, diving into subways and underground parking lots, negotiating carefully-placed traffic jams and generally wreaking havoc. The announcers were wonderfully humorous, with many memorable lines (“As the sun goes down on the City of Old Shoulders, commuters are scrambling for their cars!”) Midtown Madness 3, on the other hand, is downright flat in comparison. Very few of the courses show much imagination. While both cities feature subways, you’ll never use them except in Cruise mode. There are lots of jumps to be found, but again they are almost never used in the races. The announcers – a grizzled PI in Washington and a hyperactive cheese-eating surrender-monkey in Paris – are horribly stereotyped and deliver lines that are instantly forgettable. The game tries to inject some character in the Work Undercover mode by pitting you against an arch rival and adding several colorful characters that you will interact with several times during the course of the game, but those characters wind up being very irritating and not very funny, especially since they talk too much. The Work Undercover mode does have its funny moments – one mission asks you to pick up 5 informants in an Audi TT. After you pick up the 4th one, the game asks ‘How many Scandinavians can you fit in a TT?’ But, again, such flashes of humor are fleeting. In fact, the Work Undercover mode feels like a chore and seems to go on and on. In fact, probably the most fun in the single player game can be had simply by cruising around. The cities are full of life and character, due in no small part to the excellent graphics and decent sound. Buildings, cars and other objects all look solid and well grounded, with good lighting and reflections adding a vivid realism to the scenery. Flocks of birds rise into the sky as you approach, and pedestrians leap out of the way of your vehicle – though at times they seem almost hyperactive. The cars, both yours and others, sound very believable. Big cars sound throaty and full, with the controller’s rumble feature helping enhance the effect. Small cars sound light and zippy. Weather and time-of-day effects are believable, if a little overly stylized, but rain doesn’t have that much of an effect on your car’s performance and grip levels. Cruise mode also allows you to find and collect locked paint jobs, which are scattered about the cities. You can collect them in other modes too, but chances are you won’t have time. At the end of the day, the single player Midtown Madness 3 game is quite adequate, and it is a lot of fun while it lasts. But it needs more. Much more. It needs a difficulty setting – previous games in the series had an Amateur mode and a Professional mode, this game doesn’t. It needs physics realism slider like the previous games. It needs a replay mode. But above all, it needs more imagination, more courses and more humor. It’s a fine first effort for Digital Illusions, but it takes the series a few steps backward. Note: Midtown Madness 3 also ships with Xbox Live and split-screen multiplayer modes. I have deliberately omitted those features from this review because I have not had the opportunity to play those modes. Please see other reviews around the web for reviews of those modes.
If your looking for a racing game with realistic physics, graphics, and gameplay then I suggest you make a search for Gran Turismo. If your looking for a racing game that provides a fast and furious pace that defies the ... Read Full Review
By ghangiskhan1 | Review Date: Feb 07, 2006 | XBOX
Midtown Madness 3 was a fun game while it lasted, but it seem slike I've played it before. Oh right, I forgot it plays just like the orignal Driver on PS1. You can't get out of your car, the graphics are sub-par for the ... Read Full Review
