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Midtown Madness 2 Review
Jon Lenaway
00/12/0000
Angel Studios knows their racing. As the minds behind the Midtown Madness (PC) series, and also the upcoming Midnight Club and Smuggler’s Run for the PlayStation2, they certainly have found their niche in making some wild racing games.
Midtown Madness 2 offers the player quite a package.
The game takes place in two realistically mapped locales: San Francisco and London. There are no ovals or long gradual turns in this game. All of the tracks are mapped off by the use of checkpoints that lead you through bustling downtown areas. You had best better learn to turn with the handbrake, because almost every turn you make is a sharp corner. Just because the game is based in two cities, doesnât mean there is any shortage of track variety. The cities are highly detailed and even enable you to leap across rooftops or race around in the subway tunnels.
Gameplay
The game moves at a fast and exciting pace. Training modes help to both get you accustomed to the game and to hone some of your more advanced driving skills. In San Francisco you assume the role of a Hollywood stunt driver as a mouthy director gives you the situation for the scene. Different tasks include all manners of fast driving, slaloms and big jumps. If you choose the London missions, you are instead enrolled into a taxi driving school to test your skills. While the early training missions are fairly easy, you really are going to need practice to pass some of the later ones (a little swearing and pounding your desk couldnât hurt either).
Midtown Madness 2 also features a wide variety of other racing modes for you to play. There are some more standard races where you line up against a grid of cars and try to be the first to complete your laps. One twist, however, is the âBlitzâ racing mode. Check points are set up in such a way that you can hit them in any order you want, so your path through the race might be slightly different each time. You donât know where the finish line is until youâve passed their final checkpoint.
The wide variety of licensed cars gives you quite a range of driving styles. For a quick and agile ride, you might choose to race in the new VW Beetle. If you are looking for a bit more force, you might hop into the Cadillac or even a bus or semi. As you progress through the races, youâll be able to unlock more cars to race and wreck. Speaking of wreck, each car is fully damageable. Running into cars, poles, buildings, and flipping your car over all will have an effect on the way your car looks and eventually how it drives.
While the console developers are all patting each other on the back for online play, PC gamers share a grin knowing their games have had this for quite some time now. Midtown Madness 2 is no exception, and has quite a few online multiplayer modes to keep you happy. Some are as simple as races, but my favorite is the Cops nâ Robbers mode. Each map starts out with a hidden treasure that each driver must race to find, once the treasure is collected you must haul it back to your goal. Sound pretty easy right? Just wait until you are running from a whole fleet of cars trying to steal that treasure from you for their own personal gain.
Graphics
All in all the graphics are very clean and crisp. Many of the sections of the city look like their real world counterparts, and if your hardware is good enough youâll be able to see for quite a ways into the distance as well. In order to keep the game moving at a brisk pace, some detail it seems was sacrificed. The buildings all look rather flat if you examine them closely, a trick that seems common to PC games where lower polygon counts are compensated by larger textures. Also, cars that arenât directly involved in the race (the passing traffic) are all very plain looking. Picky things like this, however, do very little to bring down the quality of the overall experience.
Sound
The sound effects sound great, and each car makes different sounds for their motors as well as their horns. Some of the pre-race announcers can get quite irritating, however. Youâll find yourself wanting to strangle that âsurfer-dudeâ announcer on the San Francisco level. Fortunately there are quite a few announcers for each location, so you donât always have to hear the same voice. The sputtering noise you car makes when itâs about to die sounds great. Ambient noises such as traffic sounds and seagulls add a bit of life to the environments.
Comments
If you enjoy madcap racing games like Crazy Taxi, Driver, or the original Midtown Madness you should feel right at home with Midtown Madness 2. Overall, a great effort by Angel Studios
