MEMBER PROFILE FOR Himji
Average Overall Score Given: 8.00000 / 10
Total Forum Posts: 109
Reviews
Midtown Madness 3
Overall: This is a simple, get in and play racing game. Very easy to get to grips with, until you play the faster cars, then you can try to handle them and still not crash everwhere! Lotsa jumps and crasing into things makes it fun.I waited till I'd played this game a while before I reviewed, thus to give a balanced review.
If you like mad jumps and are into playing for fun rather than winning, then this game is for you. If you want realism, speed and challenge, then it might not be your cup of tea. Although some of the cars go fast, you don't have the space to race them properly (apart from the orbital motoway (freeway) in paris).
I think this is the sort of game that I'll keep coming back to as long as there's other people playing online.
Gameplay: Ok firstly I'll talk about online, sure, most people talk about offline action first but with this game, I went straight online (well after 10 minutes of offline play).
The first thing I noticed when going online (same with split screen) is there's no traffic. It bummed me out, traffic would have been nice (although bandwidth intensive so I see why). The games available are;
Hunter - Somebody starts up as a cop car and have to crash into another player to convert them into a cop car, get all the players and the last one "tagged" is the winner.
Tag - One person starts off as "it" and he has to tag another player within a time limit, once tagged you get the same time limit. If you run out of time or get damaged out (more about that later) you're out and have to spectate whilst the rest fight it out. Each person that get's knocked out causes the timer to get quicker. The last person left is the winner.
Capture the Gold - On the map, an area is highlighted. The first person through that area get's the gold, the gold can be weighted making you slower, the weight rating is set by the host. People can grab the gold from you by crashing into you. You get points for holding onto the gold. You get alot of points for heading to the next point on the map and stashing the gold there, thus spawning new gold. The winner is set by a number of points to reach
Stayaway - A random peraon gets the rabbit, you have to take the rabbit by crashing into them. The longer you keep the rabbit, the more points you get. The winner is decided by keeping the rabbit for as long as possible.
checkpoint - Race through all the checkpoints on the map. A number of set courses are available. You can go through the points in any order, sometimes it's quicker to do so.
Cruise - No real point to this mode, I don't quite get it. Drive around and do whatever you want, I suppose it's an opportunity to do crazy jumps and crashes with your mates although you can do this offline with traffic.
Ok host options are obviously you pick the game type. You can them pick a car and restrict the other peoples to the same class of car (otherwise everybody will pick the fastest). In hunter and tag, you can restric the play area so you don't have the whole map (it's huge so sometimes it's good to do so). You can have reserve friends slots and obviously change the particulars of a game (weight, scores etc). One of the best things is you can change anything at all after each game, you and your new found buddies are bored of CTG, play a round or 10 of tag. It's so versatile, the only thing that puts a pause on the action is either the host gets busy (switch and look for another server, it'll take you 10 seconds) or the host has to leave. Either way it's quick and easy so if you've got a spare 1/2 hour you can jump online play and then get late! But you don't need to worry about having enough time to play online.
Online, the game is a real blast. I find that most games I play not to win but just to goof about and have fun. Some games I'll go for the high perfomance cars so that I can either do mad jumps or try to win, other games, we'll have like a all bus tag match where it takes ages to accelerate and 2 hours to turn!!
A few issues I did have with online play was, a few glitches, cars would pause, dissapear and sometimes seem to be eating cement! But I only get these when the hosts got a poor connection. Also, I say it again, traffic would have been nice. There's a few too many hiding places and it get's boring when all people want to do is hide and not play. You can kick them off if you want to tho, Although, I've never had problems when I've hosted. If I'm not hosting, I'll just leave those games.
Ok as for offline, it's not as good as online but it's not too bad either. Firstly, you don't need to play offline to play any of the cars online, that I think is a good thing because most people will end up cheating anyways. But you do need to unlock most of them to play offline. Also you can pick up paint jobs around town (to use offline and onine) as most people play online and not offline, it's cool having a sweet paintjob on your mini :)
There's only 4 modes offline, cruise, checkpoint, which are the same as online and blitz which is like checkpoint but you race by yourself and have a timelimit. Finally, there's career or story mode which is a slightly funny not much thought story mode when you play different professions (pizza delivery, police man, limo driver etc.
Having the inclusion of traffic adds to the offline play, it's fun having to weave through the traffic trying to stick to a deadline.
YOu do damage to your car each time you hit something. Each hit you take adds damage, different cars will take more or less damage. It takes a hell of a beating to damage a car out tho.
I've spent quite a while playing offline and some of the later career mode games and race courses do get very challengin
Graphics: I don't know who says the graphics are bad, I think they're pretty good. The streets look good, the sprites look good, maybe some more animation but then they're too small to see animation. The cars are cars, you can't do much more with them, maybe the wheel animation let's the graphics down I dunno. Also I don't know if the xbox can do better, I guess I'll have to play some more xbox racers to know.
One nice thing about the visual game is the objects. You can drive through a set of tables and chairs sending them flying, knock over a fire hydrant sending spray up in the air, you can plough for pedestrians who will cartwheel out of the way or freeze in terror (you can't knock them over tho). You can leap up the stairs to the jefferson memorial or leap of a strategically placed plyboard and box thus leaping over a river.
The best tihng about the game is the sheer size of the cities, I've been playing a while but I still don't know where everything is.YOu can drive accross the park or jump oto buildings. Two very large cities, what more do you need?
Also the range of cars is great. To name a few, busses, cement mixers, garbage trucks, truck cabins, ambulances, fire engines, cop cars (you can turn siren on in all of these), limos, taxis, fle (small two seater town car) minis, beetles, audi s4, audi tt, mustang, lotus and loads more mid range and high end sports cars.
Audio: I suppose the sound is pretty spot on. The engines sound right and the music is ok and you can use custom soundtracks. I've not got any custom tracks tho so I haven't tested this out, Ive heard of bugs in it tho.....
My gripe though is the accents. My god, they couldn't have found a worse set of speech actors to do the accents. The Americans ok (well not hard for an American company to do American). And the posh British is ok as well but the French, German and other European accents are just terribble. You get alot of them in career mode so I spent the whole of the French career mode c mentioned ambient sounds which might have been nice also.
Suggestions: Another city to download will be heaven, also more cars.
Playing online with traffic would have been nice, I understand the limitations but we can ask :)
Maybe being able to play some of the career mode tracks online, eg, picking up criminals and dropping them off to the station (imaging the scramble at the sttion with 8 cars thrying to get in there.
Also get better sound actors, prefably ones that are form the area you want them to act.
Overall Score: 8.0 / 10
