Midtown Madness 3

"Digital Illusions releases an amazing title, good fun offline, simply amazing online"

Midtown Madness is a popular series of over the top racing/driving titles, bent around taking large world centers, licensed cars, and over the top mad racing it very detailed and interactive enviroments.

Visually the game is highly polished. With high poly car models, great, great looking enviroments and some of the best lighting and enviroment effects ever seen in a game. And more interactivity with the enviroment than any other driving game, period.

The gameplay is simply bar none, the best controling, feeling, and varried driver/racer on the Xbox. Although the only title that comes close to it in them is the recent released Midnight Club 2 on the Xbox, it simply doesn't even have a dream of stacking up.

Single player, main mode being ''work undercover'' is solid, polished, and quirky themed checkpoint fun. Pretty much like Midnight Club 2, only with more light hearted themes (cheesy accents and plots, themes such as pizza delivery boy and limo driver, etc) and also with the FAR surperior driving model and city designs of Midtown Madness.

You're treated with obviously faked, goofy accent laden charcters, sending you on a pretty sterotypical mission. But as MM has never been a series too serious, it fits in well with the rest of the games. It's silly, but kooky and easy to laugh at.

Missions have a solid number of themes, such as checkpoint challenges, damage limiting missions, races, etc. The cities are gorgeous and probably the best made ones in any driving title ever, even surpassing the supurb fictional gold of the GTA cities.

Online play is another story, while the single player is great fun, and worth a long look and completiion, the online play is the bigger picture here, and delivers the best Live experience ever.

There are many game types.

Tag (One person is it and tries to tag other cars, teams are avalible),

Stayaway (One person has the ''rabbit'' and tries to avoid everyone else, teams are avalible),

Hunter (Popular mode, one person is turned into a hunter (a cop car really) at the start of the match, and has to tag the rest of the players, when you are tagged you turn into a cop car, and the last person standing wins),

Checkpoint (A basic checkpoint racing mode, great fun)

Capture the Gold (Basicly capture the flag, a pile of gold spawns at some point in the map (either fixed or random) and the players attempt to grab it, and run it to their base. Can be split into teams)

One great thing is simply how much control you have over the game.

Limiting cars to a certain type or single vehicle.

Sectioning off pieces of the city.

Changing the weather from clear, to rainy to snowy.

Changing the time of day from morning to noon to dusk to night.

Even changing the season from spring to summer to fall to winter.

MM3 by far has the most polished and very solid Live setup, everything just flows like butter. Games can be joined in mid session, menus are quick and smooth, the friends list is polished, fast and always accessable, custo soundtracks are avalibe, and there is NO LAG whatsoever, upon 6 hours of online play I have never lagged. MM3 is just as smooth as mech assault.

The car list is massive, from slower cars like a silly pnik caddy, to midrange stuff like a mini cooper, to town cars like an audi, to high performance cars like a corvette or lotus, to out and out crazy stuff like a cement truck or a bus. The car types are varried, and there's over 30 to pick from.

Try out an all bus game sometime!

In terms of value and polish, the game is off the charts, the game is so smooth and high class feeling from the menu's to the visuals, to all the audio ques and live setup features.

All in all, not being a fan of driving games, I still give MM3 a 10, and despite overrating Brute Force, I've not made a mistake with this one. Instant buy for anyone with Live play, a good look to anyone without.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 06/19/03, Updated 06/19/03