Midtown Madness 2

"I flew 800 mph over San Francisco in a car and lived to tell the story!"

The reason I believe Grand Theft Auto III and the Driver series were so successful was because you could go anywhere. That very special unique feeling of knowing you can drive wherever, whenever you feel like it is awesome, and automatically gives a game an infinite amount of replayability. Be prepared to waste countless hours of your life on this game!

Weird. That's the first thing you'll mutter to yourself as start playing. Everything looks okay in the opening menu where you choose cars, they look fairly realistic but have slightly jagged edges. Then, once the game starts your car is absolutely stunning, like Gran Turismo 3 for the PC. Your driving in heaven however until you hit a road. Then, you see the other cars, and they are horrible! There is only about five different designs of cars, and are very generic. There are only two colours on each car; black for the windows and one colour for the car. The game has so many cars in the menu, they should have used these cars to randomly spawn in the game. This game makes you feel as if you're car got lost and warped into some game made a few years ago.

Speaking of the random cars, when you hit your car into another one the other one just pops up into the air. They are virtually weightless, and when you hit them you can just keep on going. Sometimes, you will be slightly pushed off your straight track, but nothing you can't regain control of. It seems to also do this when turning, because you can plow through hundreds of cars if you keep on turning left and right. The only car that is realistic is the bus, which stops you in your tracks and bounces you backwards.

The rest of the graphics in the game are great, excluding those other cars. The buildings may be blocky and just big rectangles, but at least they have designs on them that are usually colourful. The roads are designed well, and let you drive freely through the city. Of course, the trees are look like two pieces of paper stuck to each other at 90-degree angles, but you won't notice while driving hundreds of miles fast past them.

One great feature about this game is the interaction in levels. Everything can be damaged except for the buildings, but I've never played a game like this that lets you physically destroy buildings anyways. In this game, trees can be broken and run over, light poles and street signs can be broken, and any other things in your way can be broken down.

The one thing that will keep on pulling and pulling you back to this game is a monster size jump in the San Francisco. You have a lot of open area to build up speed, and can hit the jump at speeds upwards of 160 mph in the fastest car provided with the game. You fly in the air for several seconds, and can see the rooftops of all the buildings. If you time it right with a little turn, you can land yourself on one of the rooftops. Also, when your car hits the ground after the jump it will usually do a funny flip and a couple of spins. For some reason this jump just never gets old, and you'll keep testing yourself and see the fastest mph you can hit the jump at or how many cars you can dodge, which brings me to my next point.

When you want to cruise around the city, everything is customizable by changing a scrolling bar. You can set how many pedestrians around the city you will see. The number of cars on the road can be customized, from none to a citywide traffic jam. The number of police cars stationed around the city is yet another feature that can be changed.

Now, just because there are cops in this game doesn't mean there is felony. It seems the cops are always against you, no matter what you do. They will also continually ram you, and try and flip you and be a real pain. Most of the time though you won't even notice them, as you will drive right by them and they won't have time to catch up. I don't even see the point of cops in this game, except for sometimes in missions where its your job to avoid them.

There are a variety of missions and different game modes that are available to you. The real missions first have you choose between two different types of jobs. Either you will be a London cabbie, or a stunt driver. It actually doesn't matter which you choose because you can always do the other again. After successfully passing the first three missions, you'll get a first term test. There are a total of three terms and at the end you'll have a final exam. These missions have you racing through city checkpoints, trying to chase and follow a car, or destroy another vehicle. You can choose the racing section, upon which you can choose from four different modes. There is the checkpoint mode, where you progress through a series of races that get increasingly difficult. These races pit you against enemy cars, and only by placing in the top three will you unlock more tracks. There is the mode that lets you drive around freely, with no restraints called cruise. There's also the blitz mode, which makes you race around the city through checkpoints, except its you vs. the clock. The last mode, circuit, is similar to checkpoint. However, in this mode there are laps that you must complete, and you can decide on the number of opponents you would like to face.

Multiplayer is also an option in this game, but don't expect to find anyone on the internet. You'll probably have to resort to playing a game over the network, but it can be a lot of fun. The one track that you download has a thin road that keeps going in circles to the top, so you could race a friend and try and make it up first. You could also both go on the halfpipe and try and ram each other, whatever works for you. Quick race is the last playable option. It automatically launches the last game you played, whether it be a race or the cruise mode.

There are a huge amount of cars, and most of them are locked at the start of the game. Since there are a variety of ways to unlock different cars, you can click on a certain car and a little window in the bottom will tell you how to unlock that particular car. Passing missions in the job section will unlock cars and customizable colours, and winning races in the other section can also unlock cars.

After playing this game to death, going over the same jumps over and over, it had gotten fairly boring. Or so I had thought. After checking one of the message boards for this game, I found a website that contained new cars to download. On top of that, there were also whole new tracks! This resparked my interest and now I can't stop playing this game. There's an absolute abundance of new cars, from the three-wheeled car Mr. Bean kept hitting over, to an Audi monster truck police car. My personal favourite is currently the Toyota Supra, which can reach speeds of barely over 250 mph. The new maps are also crazy, and include half pipes and skyscrapers you can drive up that never seem to end. There's also mods that can unlock all the cars for you, prevent the warning message when you improperly shut down the game, and many other things you would never even think of.

After downloading yet another new car, called the Audi TT NOS Boost, I was still looking for an insanely fast car. This particular car was fairly fast, but nothing too impressive. I still liked the Toyota Supra better because of its speed. However, just for fun when I came to an extremely sharp turn, I used the handbrake. It turns out that the handbrake is the boost in NOS Boost. I could reach speeds of 300 mph in less then five seconds, where in any other car I couldn't even reach that at top speed. I've never been able to reach the top speed of this car, but I have gotten over 950 mph. Once over 200 mph however, your car becomes extremely hard to handle. Hitting any jump or little tilt in a road will send this car absolutely flying, across the whole city. This has got to be one of the most insane things I've ever played around with in a game, because of this impossibly fast car.

The two tracks that come with the game are modeled after real world cities, San Francisco and London. Both of these cities look like their real-life counterparts. San Francisco, by far the largest city, has all the big jumps you would expect. Of course, the main attraction in the city is the big jump I described earlier, but racing through the streets finding other jumps can be fun to. The roads are long and wide, giving you a lot of space to try and avoid other cars. There is a highway, and the onramp gives a sort of jump that lets you smash through glass. Hidden jumps are also littered through the city, and are hard to find but rewarding when you do. London has its perks, but not as many. The first problem is that the city streets are incredibly thin, making it hard to gain speed and pass cars. There is one big jump, across a drawbridge that seems to never stop moving. The only problem is that the bridge is sometimes down for a while, forcing you to wait for it to be raised. There's also the fact that there's the big chunk of concrete at the ends of the bridge that stops you dead in your tracks when you hit it, and will almost always get in your way while your still trying to fly through the air. When driving through the level, you may notice a ship in the middle of the water. You have to drive straight through a certain area and hit a special jump just right, but then you'll land on the ship. The only problem is you can't get off of it, and you must sink your car in the water to restart.

It's a very different system of the way the car handles damage. In the bottom of your screen, you see a green bar that will turn more red as you get more damage by hitting walls and objects. Once this bar is completely red, then your car stalls for a few seconds, and then a new car is warped into the exact same space. There is also several views, including the 1st person, three 3rd person views and a cinematic view. By pressing F2 during the game, you will be presented with hotkeys for changing different options, and there's over an astounding 40 customizable options.

One problem I had with the game was the difficulty of the missions. They are absolutely impossible. I can't find one single possible way to beat the last half of the missions for both London cabbie and stunt driver. I seriously played one mission over 25 times, and knew the track off by heart, yet still I missed the last checkpoint by over ten seconds. I had to resort to using cheats, but only because I wanted to unlock the rest of the cars. And trust me, I hate using cheats in games to beat things I haven't already, yet it was a necessity in this game.

Overall, Midtown Madness 2 hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. It has a huge amount of replayability, with all the cars available to download and all the tracks to play on. There are also those huge jumps that never get old, and just driving around the city streets as fast as you can can be a blast. You'll be testing out new cars for weeks, and trying to master tricks on the half pipe. This game has been underrated and deserves more recognition, and with the small price tag for it it makes itself a must-buy. There's no other game on the PC like it, and it doesn't matter if you like racing games or not, there's a very good chance you'll like this game.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/02/02, Updated 05/02/02