The Simpsons: Hit & Run

"Shows laziness in all aspects."

Welcome to Hit & Run, a game that promised me it would be funny, fun and have thrilling missions, but the truth is, they the Simpson's crew shouldn't have even tried, they should have just made a movie and produced some decent entertainment instead of sticking us with this stupid game.

Everything in the game spells laziness, from the rushed missions to the poorly executed plot to the gameplay that resembles Grand Theft Auto so badly it ain't funny (if you play the two games back-to-back, you'll pretty much be playing the same game). The plot would have worked in a Simpson's movie, but it sure as hell doesn't work here. The plot is okay, but they try to make you play it through in a series of missions, which are always, ALWAYS by car, no matter what it is. And the worst part of it is, it's usually fetch questing, and you sometimes have to run trough five missions just to meet one guy who Bart thought could help him at the beginning of the level.

No matter what the mission is, it is always by car. Be it chasing someone, retrieving someone or collecting a line of random objects. There's one mission where, after Cletus finds out you're not some New Yorker, he wants you to help him collect ketchup packets to feed his family over the winter. However, like most missions where you "help someone" it's actually the other person who drive, you just sit in the passenger's seat. 99% of these missions could have been accomplished just as easily had you not been there. Not only that, but Marge went through the trouble of buying an orange jumpsuit before the mission saying "I don't wanna get my clothes dirty." What law says you have to collect everything by car? What law says everything you need is lined up on the streets? Oh yeah, the law that says the game-makers were too lazy to make you actually do something that makes sense (i.e. getting out of your car and going through trash cans to find those ketchup packets) but no, they just line-em up on the streets, slap on a two-minute timer and call it a mission.

Not only that, but some of these missions are clearly fillers. I mean, some of them it's so painfully obvious that it hurts. All of level 2 is Bart trying to retrieve a new popular video game (which sounds pretty fun, by the way), but then he comes to one of Nelson's friends who tells him that the game is lame and that you should go get some illegal fireworks instead. Once again, two minute timer, go collect them off some random people (it just tells you where they are, it doesn't say at all how Bart knows they have fireworks or how he knows where they are). So of course, after you try five-times in a row, lose after lose to collect them all in the short time limit, all you get is one painfully-easy car chase and then Bart says "I fought the law and I won." But right after that, it tells you to drive over to the Googleplex (again, no reason Bart would know to go there), talk to Comic book dude, then he just continues the hunt for the game. Those fireworks will have no significance on the game at ALL, you just got them for the heck of it, an extra mission to make the game longer.

Let's look at those five loses a little closer: They can be so infuriating and unrealistic it ain't funny. If Apu is in a hurry to find whatever is next in the mission, he's not gonna know how much time he has. He's not gonna know he has exactly two minutes to get there, and if that last second ticks off, it's too late. But he does, so if you run out of time, tough luck. All it does it give you a "You lost" screen and give you an option to retry, sometimes a few missions back that you have to do over. Again, sign of laziness. You can tell they wanted to make a difficult game, but this isn't the way to go about. Come on, put a little effort into it!

Another show of laziness: the cop-car chases. As you run people over, a little bar will fill up, but if you sit still it will go back down. So you can actually get away with running over masses of people, as long as you put a few seconds between each one. But what shows laziness is that they just set it so that every prop you kick over will drive out the meter, but this includes stuff that your character owns. Seriously, why would the cops care if Homer decides to kick over his own mailbox? On the Halloween level, why would they care if he decides to crush his own frickin' jack-o-lanterns? And yet, stuff like flooding the Kwik-E-Mart with slushy, or running around in front of and on top of the school in your underwear will not get you a trace of attention. Come on!

Now let's move on to the visuals. While the roads can look pretty good, the houses, the backgrounds and the people are all two bright and cheery for a game that tries to be creepy (especially with said Halloween level). You can see they spent a little while on these, but not as much as most games. Once again, you're subjected to invisible walls. If you jump a ramp with a racecar, you'll get the soaring, and screaming of the character, and it'll feel great until you hit the invisible wall at the end of the level. All the houses remain nicely beyond this limit, so you can't go up and touch most of them, and the only ones you can go inside is yours, the Kwik-E-Mart, and a few other places of interest. The game is ridden with graphical glitches, like if you run over someone, all they do is take on a "flailing" position, fly a few feet through the air (in a really cheesy fashion), and then get up, unharmed. Sometimes, he goes through your car, sometimes you go through your own car, and I swear that car door isn't even solid.

As far as sound goes, it's not bad. You get standard songs, but nothing too great. Most of the sounds are cheesy to the point where you can tell they were made by recording someone doing a similar action. Like for crushing a pumpkin, they just recorded someone slapping blocks of wood together. The music is nothing memorable, and unless you're in your car, there won't even be any. On foot, there's no music whatsoever. So only in the car, and even then there's nothing memorable. It's not too bad.

Story: 7
Gameplay: 3
Graphics: 7
Music: 7
Overall: 3 (not an average)

Unless you're one of those overly-protected kids who's mothers always check the ratings on the games, you might as well Grand Theft Auto. This is that, only not done as well and with simpson's characters. *Sigh* If they had put in a little more effort, this game could have been great.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 12/12/05