Midtown Madness 2

"An excellent PC game with a combination of all the essentials!"

Introduction
Lately there have being many games released on all platforms which involve cars, driving around a city being a law-abiding citizen and lots of cops chasing after you.

Such examples include Midtown Madness 1 (smart!), the Driver series on the Playstation and PC, the Grand Theft Auto line of games on Playstation and PC.. There are many out but this genre is just taking off..

Gameplay
Midtown Madness stays very close to the original (which I do not own). Anyway, the gameplay is the same (based on what I remember from playing MM1 at the shops), drive around, get caught by cops, big chase, and end up somewhere else.

For those who aren't experienced with this genre or haven't played the games much, it is fun fun fun. If you have played GTA and liked it, you might like the prospect of being chased by police and the opportunity to run them into the water, or cause them to smash into trees, or whatever your heart so desires (mine likes to make the cops run off the bridges!)..

The single player has BLITZ which is just a race.. The checkpoints is pretty self-explanatory. Nothing special here... But its just that free-cruise is so good. You drive around the large cities and wonder wherever you feel like driving... Nearly everything is interactive, so, you can destroy glass panes, traffic lights, lamp posts, other cars, garbage bins.. anything.. but alot of the stuff is very unrealistic in the sense that a car going at 100km/h can smash three ''U-Move'' trucks and knock a traffic light over.. You'll understand if you play..

The single player also has mission like things. You can be either a Cabby in London (for those who don't speak that, a Cab driver).. or a Stunt driver.. Each has several missions.. Quite fun..

The game is very customizable I might add... You can control everything... When your using CRUISE, you control the amount of Pedestrians (no effect on you though), Traffic Density (another self-explanatory thing).. and Cop Density (amount of Police to chase you)..

Graphics
Pretty good.. Usual stuff from Microsoft.. Nothing spectacular.. It would have being better if they included lights on your car which did something in the NIGHT mode but I'm still happy with it..

Beware, your computer can get a bit slow when there are lots of cars on the screen so tone your Special FX down.. And as for the minimum requirements on the box, make sure you have at least 128mb of RAM or this game will have serious problems...

Sound/Music
The sounds are pretty good, kinda hallow though.. I didn't get much chance to use anything too good as I did not want the framerate to go down too much. Leaving the sound quality on medium is fine as the game does not really have much to say except ''broom'' or (*thinks of some kind of crash sound*) ''BOOM''....

The music has two options.. City sounds or Music... City sounds are like.. The waves crashing on the harbour, the birds flying, other cars... Things like that.. Music is also self-explanatory...

Other/Overall Presentation

The game has reasonably easy menus to use.. Not too much loading time.. This game supports alot of controllers and force feedback settings (Microsoft ways)...

There are alot of licenses in this game.. Whilst none of them except for a couple are of any good, this game does have the added feature of being able to download many things of the 'net..

Multiplayer

This is kick-ass!!! (not much else to say).. you play Cops 'n Robbers on the ZONE system (Microsoft) and you meet up with other people and you just drive around.. And some are cops, some are normal cars and you chase each other.. Lots of fun despite the boring sounding title.

Lasting Appeal

The game can be finished in less than a fortnight (assuming you choose both missions)... But the cruise will last you forever and the downloadable cars and mods which are seriously TOP-NOTCH..

But it should be noted, there are only TWO cities in the whole game.. Whilst some won't complain as these cities are HUGE!!.. As large as the GTA2 cities were.. Bigger maybe.. With more interesting drops and cliffs (as this is a First Person driver - my name for it)...

Scores

+ Fun to play CRUISE
+ Being a TAXI driver is kinda fun
+ Easy to learn
+ New cars and mods to download
+ Multiplayer is fun
+ A few good car licenses (Audi and VW)

- Basic car designs (included with the game)
- only Two cities
- Cops are a bit stupid / too smart sometimes

Gameplay - 10
Nothing to say really.. Its fun to play CRUISE all day!

Graphics - 7
Lagged too much sometimes.. But my PC isn't all that great... I did fix up the options but anyway, even on the best settings (at EB), it didn't look that great.. Just a highly reflective version of Driver would describe it.

Sound/Music - 7
Just the basics.. Nothing special.

Other/Overall Presentation - 8
Good menus and all.. But now that I've noticed.. What is it with the capital letters for some of those cars?? Very weird.. But the menus and lag and everything make this only an 8... The two cities also helped bump this up.. (despite being only TWO)

Lasting Appeal - 10
Multiplayer + Downloads.. kinda like Need for Speed...

Author's Comment
Good game.. Could have being alot better than what it was but it is still a good game.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/11/01, Updated 06/14/01