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Midtown Madness 3 Review |
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Midtown Madness 3
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The third installment of the Midtown Madness series and by far the most successful to date is the new Midtown Madness 3. The first two MM games were exclusive the the PC, but now the high speed smash it up action has been released on the X-Box console with great success. An important note about this game is that while there is a rather extensive variety of single player modes as well as split screen / system link play, this game was really created to be played on X-Box Live.
The game features two very detailed cities, Paris and Washington D.C. that have been recreated quite well, each level is massive and contains all of the trademark monuments that you might recognize if you were actually in either one of these cities. As I said there are a variety of single player modes, the best way to get a good handle on how the game works and what it's all about is to hop into cruise mode right away. In cruise mode you can set the time of day, city, weather, cop density, traffic density, and pedestrian density before you begin. Then you choose your vehicle and begin driving, go anywhere in the city and do anything you like, if you've set the game so that police are active if you break the law you'll be chased down by a number of officers who do anything to try to stop you.
After you get a good feel for how the game works playing cruise mode, you'll probably want to move on to the next single player mode which is to work undercover. In this game mode you're and undercover officer that has to take up a variety of jobs such as a pizza delivery guy, car rental worker, and limousine driver in an attempt to spy on criminals around town. To be perfectly honest this game mode gets pretty boring pretty quick, while each of the different missions you do are technically different than the last, they're all the same, drive to one place or a series of places as fast as you can so that you can unlock the next mission. The catch is that you'll probably want to complete these missions so that you can unlock new and better cars for other game modes.
The other two single player modes are Blitz and Checkpoint. Blitz is an all out race around town against five other drivers through a series of checkpoints, the first to reach the finish after passing through all the checkpoints wins, by winning these races more Blitz races are unlocked and other goodies are unlocked after you clear the entire series. Checkpoint is similar to Blitz except there are no other racers, it's just you trying to reach the finish line before the timer runs out. The same rules apply to this mode, if you win you unlock more Checkpoint races, and if you clear the series you unlock even more goodies.
Single player in a game like this however can get pretty dull after awhile, that's where XBLive comes in. In live mode there are several great game modes to experience, of course Blitz and Checkpoint are still there. Other modes include Capture The Gold, a type of capture the flag / cops and robbers mode. Tag which is pretty standard, if you're it you chase down other cars and players and tag them so that they're it. In Hunter mode one car starts as the car who is it and tries to tag all the other cars, once another car is tagged they too are a hunter, and the game continues until only one player remains. Stayaway mode is the final mode in which you play a kind of reversed game of tag, where you try to stay away from the other cars and stay it as long as you possibly can to win. All of the multiplayer modes except cruise and cruise and checkpoint can also be played on teams to mix it up a little bit.
The graphics on this game are relatively good, one thing I didn't notice right away but stood out after playing for quite awhile was the detail put into the buildings, the reflection effects are phenomenal and some buildings can even be damaged by slamming into store windows hard enough. Everything runs smoothly and has a good feel to it, there are no problems with too much activity on the screen slowing down the game and making it hard to play. A nice feature is the interactivity of the levels, there's all kinds of obstacles that you can plow through to create your own shortcuts, also when you run into something like a light pole or a tree in this game, unlike other similar arcade type racing games, you don't come to a complete stop and ask why, why would anyone make a light pole an unmovable object. Plowing through these objects will slightly decrease your speed, but by no means is a major factor. Speaking of plowing through objects, the physics involved with vehicle collisions are also right on target for this type of game, you do get slowed down when you hit another car, but the physics favor you and usually toss the other car out of the way and you continue on your way with only a minimal loss of speed.
I'll be honest with you this is not my time of game by any measure, but that doesn't mean it's not a good game, if you're into this type of arcade mode smash em up inner city racing, then this is definitely the game you want. The graphics are clean, the game play is clean, and the multiplayer support is fantastic. So if you've played the first two or have played similar games to this on the console and enjoyed them, I'd recommend you pick this one up.
Review By: Travis Parrott
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