The Italian Job

"When Crazy Taxi Meets Mob"

Introduction
Italian Job – When Crazy Taxi meets Mob

Italian Job is a fast-paced racing game. Instead of ordinary racing games where you must compete and rush to the finishing line, Italian Job has a bit of twist. Similar to Crazy Taxi, there’s no finishing line and no obstacles. Unlike Crazy Taxi, you don’t pick up passengers. Instead, you take on missions, illegal missions. You are being trained to be the driver of a mob company, and there are many missions for you to complete. Also, you have your very own enemy, the friendly neighborhood police cars. And your very own rival the Mafias, who will do anything at all costs to pin you down. Avoid them at your best, if you see them and they see you; get the hell outta there.

Gameplay: 8
Italian Job has a small learning curve; all of the controls are very simple. 4 buttons are not used! And the R1 is practically useless; at most, it will only take you 15 minutes to learn how to steer those Mini Coopers. Your missions aren’t explained at the start, so be sure to press START and check your Mission Objective. The objectives are pretty interesting, and they have small plot twists as well. The game has three different maps, London, Turin and Alps, each with their own difficulty settings. However, you must complete them in order.

Graphics: 7
Admit it, the graphics isn’t as good as Crazy Taxi’s, however, they are still pretty to look at. There are different vehicles for you to choose from, each ranging with their handling, grip and speed. Buildings are quite detailed, and roads are really messy. If you’ve never been to London, Turin or Alps, you are definitely going to be lost. Trust me, I never been to either of the places. The worst thing has got to be that there’s NO map. You’ll have to follow the dang arrow. Also, cars look quite alike as well. You’ll have trouble trying to bypass the police cars this way.

Audio: 8
There are cheery background music, speech banks and sound effects in the game itself. Crashing, honking, screaming is really normal. The passengers in the car also give comments as well. If you swerve the car too much, you may end up getting an exclamation comment. These are really minor details though, so pay no heed to them.

Story: 7
It seems that you are being put into this pot of trouble. You take the role of many of the Italian Job members and complete missions on the way. The missions each have a story of their own, and it would be impossible for me to say all of them out. Anyways, the stories are quite interesting, though some of them are typical. But hey, which driving game has stories?

Replayability: 8
There are many vehicles to unlock as you carry on and advance through the game. Besides, the mission will hook you on and you’ll just find yourself clicking X, and X over and over again. If you fail, just try again. One annoying this is that you can’t disable those sort-of-FMVs, or cutscene. One very good example is in Mafia Mania, and that scene where the lady walks up the airplane is quite tedious if you must look at it again and again. Man, that mission was tough.

Buy or Rent?: Buy over rent
If you love driving games, and absolutely love Crazy Taxi, you can give this game a shot. However, if you are PS2 or Dreamcast lovers, this game may seem bad to you because of it’s graphics. If that’s the case, rent it then. But 60% of my vote goes to buy over rent.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/21/02, Updated 03/01/03