We take a look at an updated build of the latest title in the popular series...

TVG recently received an updated build of Midtown Madness 3 – the Xbox exclusive racer currently in development at D.I.C.E (Rallisport Challenge, Battlefield 1942). Featuring faithfully realised environments based on Paris and Washington D.C, the final game will feature Xbox Live! support, which could prove to be the games surviving grace.<br><br>Not having played previous games in the series, it’s quite hard to understand why this franchise has become so popular on the PC. Perhaps it’s because of the lack of decent arcade racers on that format, but from the extensive playtest that we’ve had on the latest version it’s hard to recommend such a generic racer.<br><br>The main single player mode sees players taking on a variety of missions in the ‘Work Undercover’ mode, selecting from either Paris or Washington D.C it’s up to the player to complete these to progress further into the game. Each city has seven different challenges, each of which has four different tasks to try out ranging from pizza delivering to stunt car driving.<br><br>Although there is a fair degree of challenges to complete, the variety between these is minimal at best and usually revolves around the player having to drive to different locations to pick up objects or people and drive them to another location. Most of the challenges typically see another competitor racing against you, ensuring there’s a good sense of urgency to each mission. To spice up the action races and a few other challenges are thrown in, but at the end of the day this just feels like more of the same of what we’ve been doing for the last couple of years.<br><br>To its credit the actual racing experience is geared towards fun and racing is instantly accessible. There’s very little handling difference between the varieties of cars that you’ll get to drive, whilst actually taking the car out for a spin is an enjoyable if relatively easy ride. Collisions with the huge amounts of civilian traffic and roadside obstacles is geared towards the arcade side of unrealistic; collisions with others cars does little to drop your overall speed as their car gets spectacularly smashed out of your way and leaves you free to move on. Unfortunately the complete lack of depth is an issue that needs to be addressed in our eyes; Crazy Taxi had a surprising amount of depth compared to this thanks to the hidden moves such as the Crazy Drift and Crazy Boost manoeuvres, because of the lack of such moves, Midtown Madness 3 gets repetitive too quickly and does little to hold our interest.<br><br>As you progress through the game you’ll unlock new cars to race in the multiplayer mode. Unfortunately we couldn’t get the Xbox Live! feature to work, however we suspect that it will follow closely to the offline multiplayer mode. Currently there are only two modes for offline multiplayer – Cruise and Checkpoint – this sees players driving around with no time limits or damage, and racing between different checkpoints respectively. Once again it’s a lack of depth and it’s unlikely at this stage that the multiplayer will sustain any interest; as one of the first Xbox Live! racers it’s guaranteed to generate interest, we just hope there’s a little more substance to the online side.<br><br>Visually Midtown Madness 3 is an extremely mixed bag, the recreations of Washington D.C and Paris look authentic; they’re absolutely huge and feature hundreds of civilian cars and pedestrians to populate the screen. As we’ve said before realistic collisions don’t appear to be the games strongest point, so driving like a maniac and smashing everything out of your way seems to pay off as well as carefully driving through the traffic!<br><br>Because of the sheer amount going on, the actual visual quality is a level below what we’ve come to expect from the Xbox; textures are bland, repetitive and lack the sheen that we expect. Taking a close look at objects within the game reveals lower then expected polygon counts, in particular the various pedestrians look angular and disjointed, whilst we’ve certainly seen better car models in titles such as Project Gotham and Racing Evolutionalize. To its credit, Midtown Madness 3 keeps everything running at a blisteringly fast pace no matter how much is on screen; however the overall PS2 look of the game may put off some of the Xbox owners.<br><br>To make matters worse the game features absolutely atrocious voice acting heavily based on the cliché stereotypes; it’s unlikely you’ll smile after listening to the apparently humorous ‘franglais’ for more then five minutes.