Midtown Madness 2 - IGN (original) (raw)

Don't call it a comeback... but feel free to call it a cousin. The sequel to Midtown Madness, one of IGNPC's favorite racing games of the last few years, finally has a sibling in the bi-continental Midtown Madness 2. This time around you've got two giant cities (San Francisco and London), more cars, a new mode and a ton more tracks to contend with. But will it fulfill your needs? Will it provide you with the steering-wheel based delights that you so desire? Yes. Spotty in structure and execution, but packed with a ton of entertainment value, Midtown Madness 2 is a strong sequel that keeps the city madness alive, one more time.

The gameplay will be instantly familiar to anyone who experienced the original, with a similar setup and structure -- the new Crash Course mode being the one major exception. You'll be able to jump into a race instantly and get a feel for the cars, or maybe just step into Cruise mode and drive around to your heart's content until you're ready for a new competition. And once you see the locked cars, you'll definitely want to take the game out of neutral and start unlocking some of the secrets that spice up the experience.

The new cars give you even more ways to crash and burn (or succeed, if that's your fetish), with new additions to the "gi-mongous" category of car sizes (my personal favorite being the psychedelic double decker bus), as well as some really well-rounded street racers like the Audi TT. Unfortunately, given the nature of the game, you'll rarely if ever use most of the cars. It would have been nice to have had a "match cars" option in the game, for times when you'd like to experience a race full of firetrucks, or mini coopers, but unfortunately if you want to win a race, you'll have to stick with the fastest and most reliable vehicles, and skip the cute-but-useless slowpokes. This leaves you with a few select cars, and a lot of fun showpieces that are a blast for Cruise mode, but will just leave you frustrated in the course of competitive events.

The Crash Courses are one of the best new additions to the series, giving you tough but short tasks that test your driving skills and precision. You'll weave though parked cars in London, you'll avoid the cops while hitting the checkpoints in San Francisco, and you'll learn exactly just how fast you can take a corner in order to keep a constant speed. While tough, they'll get you up to speed on the advanced techniques you'll need to succeed in the later Blitz and Circuit courses in the game, which you'll definitely want to do if you just have to have that hippy skin for your Light Tactical Vehicle.

The bouncy physics work incredibly well in a multiplayer game, where crashes are the prerequisite, and fishtailing is king -- but they'll work to grind your teeth down when trying to Blitz races that require precision, or a tight Circuit race where one jostle from a competing car will more often than not send you into a spin. Like Driver, sometimes the very thing that makes the racing fun is the thing that will drive you nuts... but overall it's well worth the struggle to keep your car under control. While Tal has always enjoyed using a wheel to take on MM, I've always found that a joystick gives you all the precision of a wheel, but with much quicker reaction times -- something that I feel is required to succeed in some of the nastier spaghetti courses within MM2.

What MM2 doesn't provide, however, is a strong overall structure. Levels are great, but they're separated simply by pulldown menus, left for you to unlock. As with Motocross Madness, this seemingly logical setup takes away one major factor that keeps gamers coming back for more -- mystery. London is instantly accessible, as are a huge bulk of the features in the game. The more utilitarian structure seems like a smart move, but it ends up taking away the goal-driven drive that pushes you to complete that next race, or push harder to see the next new environment. The Crash Course option is a perfect example of the series moving into a tighter direction, however, with short goals leading up to tough levels, and tied together with the ultimate prize of unlocking a special car or color. You will have to beat section of the game in order to unlock new cars and colors, so there's still an incentive to keep going in the other modes of the game, but it would be nice to see the game wrapped into a neater package overall.

The sounds are identical to the original, with the big addition of more voice-overs during the races, including a hippy and a homie in San Francisco, and a punk and a Scot in London. The variety spices things up a bit, especially given that there's no actual in-game music during the courses.

The graphics are nearly identical to the original... which ends up being one of the weaker points of the game. The detail on the cars is precise, but the environments themselves range from crisp and accurate to absolutely laughable when it comes to some textures (jump onto a barge and you'll see what we mean). While it's understandable given the sheer number of cars and streets that have to be rendered by the engine, we were hoping for a more aggressive step forward from the original.

The multiplayer continues in the original's tradition, giving you more ways to scream loudly in the office workplace... but without fixing some of the lag problems that plagued the original. The game tends to run choppy in multiplayer games, even during LAN battles, and the cars sometimes appear in odd positions, or inaccurately placed on the map, something that's hard to deal with when you're trying to ram a car that looks like it's standing on one end. Backwards. It's one of the best multiplayer gigs around, but it would have been nice to have had a smoother multiplayer game, or at least one with more new features.

But all of these criticisms ignore what makes Midtown Madness 2 pure unadulterated fun at its core. You may hate the physics one moment, or become frustrated when the framerate begins to chunk down for no apparent reason, but you'll forget those problems the first time you launch off of the Embarcadero sculpture, or drive through the London underground. The title sums it up perfectly in that this game succeeds by throwing miles of madness in your way, with only your fingers to navigate the beautiful mess. Destroying cars, running the wrong way on the freeway, brushing the top of a tunnel because you've just flown into it at 148mph -- they're all the things we wish we could do in these real-life cities, but will never (well, at least rarely) have the opportunity to do in real life. This is cake with mounds of frosting, so who cares if there are a few salty bits in all the sweetness here and there?

It's a sign of misguided perfection when you'll have almost as much fun crashing through oncoming traffic in a fire truck as you will winning a major race driving a high-end Panoz roadster. Midtown Madness 2 has a backbone of pure steel, but the overall structure has more chunks than chiseled features. But that's okay. MM2 has a heart of gold, and there's more than enough charm to keep you coming back for more, even if more means trying to launch off the roof of the Transamerica pyramid in a London Cab. Welcome back, Midtown.

-- Vincent Lopez

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