Midtown Madness 3

"A good racing game that knows how to use X-Box live"

I recently picked up a copy of Midtown Madness 3. The game is a racing game for the X-Box that has some excellent X-Box Live support. I enjoyed the game a lot and I think it is one of the best Racing games out for the X-Box.

Gameplay: The game plays pretty good. It plays a lot like most driving games. The single player mode that is offered is pretty simple. You just do races, pick-ups, and other things. These races become a little boring, but there is a little twist to each race. A problem I had was that sometimes the game becomes trial and error and other times you can be winning the whole race and at the last checkpoint easily lose. This offers some challenge, but is sometimes frustrating. You can easily plow threw cars and other things which makes the game unreal, but it makes it much easier to drive and if you hit a car once you don’t have to restart the race. The X-Box live features are a lot of fun. There are quite a lot of players and a few games to play. You can a game where one car starts as a cop and has to convert the other players into cops until there is one player left. You can also just cruise around and do nothing. The X-Box live support really helps the game and adds to it greatly.

Graphics: The graphic models are pretty simple. They are pretty good, but nothing really special. The car that you are driving looks nice, but pedestrians and traffic don’t look as good. A problem with it is that the cars will drive out of a side road to try to hit you or to just move out and they will sometimes go through other cars. The locations are huge and filled with tons of little side paths and other things. They are very colorful and full of little secrets and other things. Overall the graphics are pretty nice.

Sound: The sound is quite nice. The cars sound great to the starting of the car to the honking of its horn. The crashes sound also sound very good. The voice acting is ok and the accents of the people are sort of funny, but not great. The voice acting could be improved, but I don’t expect great voice acting from a driving game.

Overall: The game is a solid driving game that is worth at least a rent if not a buy. You will probably have loads of fun with the stuff off the X-Box live and there should be some downloadable content added to the game. Overall it gets an…..

8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/21/03, Updated 07/21/03