Midtown Madness
What’s your pain threshold for bad voice acting?
Tags: Midtown Madness 3 Categories: Reviews, Xbox Reviews
Posted by Travis on Sep 15th, 2003
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Midtown Madness 3 (title page) | 1+ | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Racing | Yes | ||
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Wei Wei watch out you crazy American driver. Midtown madness is one of the craziest racing games since… well, Crazy Taxi. With 50 plus mission this will keep you busy for a few weekends maybe?
Midtown is your basic point to point racing game similar to Crazy Taxi. Your goals vary between picking up guests and driving them around town while there yelling how crappy you drive to picking up vaults at various spots in Pairs. The sooner you learn to care for your car the better as time critical missions come down to the wire.
Your missions are explained old school bond style through your car radio with built-in TV. You must complete 3 to 4 missions depending on the level before you can move on to the next level. Finishing the last mission earns you the car you were driving for multiplayer or single race modes.
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There is a pretty accurate detail of the cities in the game. Midtown Madness 3 starts off with the choice of two different locations: Paris or Washington D.C. With 25 plus missions per city, ranging anywhere from being a pizza deliverer to a police officer, this is plenty to do here (or so we thought).
After playing halfway through they game you soon begin to realize it’s the same three missions slightly altered, whether it is picking up pizza boxes or dropping off passengers all around town. While you are in different cars and put under a different circumstances it still doesn’t stray to far from the same 3 basic concepts. While this can be fun at first it becomes quite repetitive and boring after awhile.
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Going after some of the hidden rewards did become quite challenging. In single race mode finding ramps across rivers proved to be very fun. Watching my Lamborghini fly over a 400 ft river gap and slamming into the building on the other side was the only thing I found to be exciting one afternoon.
Midtown does have a good selection of cars to choose from once you earned them all. Anywhere from a police car to a dump truck, though all of them drove alike. With the exception of different speeds whether you were a dump truck or Lotus your back end always slid out like it was on wet pavement.
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Graphically this game could have done better considering this is an Xbox exclusive with no pc release to be expected. It felt very unpolished and dated compared to other recent driving games available. Environments are what you’d expect from your typical rampage driving games. Trash cans and poles get tossed around when you hit them at 100mph. Driving Areas were quite large and well thought out. You could drive anywhere you wanted to go and sometimes had to if you wanted a secret.
The voice acting was beyond hideous, if not a bit corny. Mathilda’s voice from Paris is worse than running my nails across the chalkboard (shivers). Muting her became the only cure.
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Controls are simple with gas and brake on the triggers this is easy to get around with.
Multiplayer modes are left wanting. With nothing more to offer than your typical one on one racing or the free roam bashing of the town your better of with a pure racing game such as Rallisport Challenge, Project Gotham Racing, or Midnight Club 2. In the single race mode they did add a feature called checkpoint, though nothing different from what you can get in Midnight Club 2. You drive through checkpoints throughout the town until you reach the finish.
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You have you choice of split screen system link or Xbox LIVE. The online feature, which offers up to 8 players racing around either of the two cities, is one of the better features of the game. There are different competitions which do add a little to the game experience. Hunter turns one of the players into a cop car, who then is responsible for ramming the other cars, and in turn making them the hunter. Capture The Gold puts the players into different locations around the city, and makes them race to pick up gold blocks scattered around and return them. You lose the blocks when rammed by one of the other players, which makes the mode play like some of smugglers runs multiplayer modes. There is also a Tag mode, which is has pretty obvious goals, and a Stay Away mode, which is basically reverse tag.
The online mode also does not require you to unlock the cars during the one player game to have them available throughout. The servers are easy to access and allow mid game logins. Playing against other players is much better than playing against the very annoying computer, and their smack talk is much better than having your ears bleed from Mathilda’s nerve wracking shrieks.
All in all Midtown does offer a different route in choosing a racing game but I’d stick to Midnight Club 2. The game is far more of an arcade adventure than a serious racing game, but for those of you who liked Crazy Taxi, there are some points that can be somewhat entertaining. The game needs more modes to choose from and new voice actors to be a real competitor though.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
Large Driving Area’s Large car selection Online mode |
5.3 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
Graphics Voices |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| When I first started playing, I really enjoyed the game. About half way through the game the repetive missions and bad voice acting made me want to kick the dog. Stupid dog!!!! | |
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Tags: Midtown Madness 3
Posted by Travis on Sep 15th, 2003 and is filed under Reviews, Xbox Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
