Midtown Madness 2 Review

Another thing that really bothered me in the first part were the stupid, rotten cops. You know what I'm on about... They simply hate you. You can drive slowly, carefully, but as soon as they see you, they turn their sirens on and start the chase. Was it that difficult to make a routine which would set the cops off only if you caused a crash, went over the speed limit or went through a red light? The same goes for the races... the other care can produce utter mayhem, but the cops will only chase you. Not even driving a police car or fire-truck helped.

The game contains several mods. The most interesting of those seems to be the Crash Course --- after you lost you job as at telephone physics and went penniless, your uncle offers you to become a London cabby / San Francisco stunt driver. After you choose your city/profession, you get a series of tasks to perform... those are mainly missions during which you have to follow a suspicious car, reach all checkpoints in designated time, loose the police or anyone else following you. It sometimes gets harder as they tend to ask you to return the car undamaged, or perform some elaborate trick. It all looks like certain missions in Driver. The rest of the mods are déjà vu...

Cruise - free driving, where only cops can trouble you, if you do not turn them off, that is. This mode is fun and useful for getting to know your way around town.
Blitz race - checkpoint race against the clock. It's up to you to select the best way and beat that stopwatch. If you smash your car, you start all over.
Circuit Race - classical circuit race with fixed paths and a severe lack of pedestrians.
Checkpoint race - you have to meet all the checkpoints. You don't have to do it in a specific order; you just have to do it in specified time.

Initially, you will only have access to several vehicles, and your success on the streets will unlock new cars, tracks and custom paint jobs... Midtown Madness 2 features 19 vehicles, 11 of which have already been seen in the first part of the game. The new vehicles include: Audi TT, New Mini Cooper, New VW Beetle RSi, New VW Beetle Dune, Double Decker bus, London cab... Each with specific Horsepower, Top Speed, Durability and Mass, but as I already stated, those properties do NOT influence vehicles' in-game behavior.

The game would be no good if it lacked a multiplayer mode. It supports up to 8 players and several quite irritating flaws. The programmers, for some strange reason never managed to throw in bots into MP sessions, so, all the cars you get to see apart from your friends' cars will be parked. The programmers also left the network code unfinished, so you can expect a decent lag. It's a real shame that Midtown Madness still suffers from things like that. Apart from the standard mods, MP features a Cops vs. Robbers mod in which you have to steal gold and run away. This mod has three sub-mods: FFA, Cops vs. Robbers and Robbers vs. Robbers. The most interesting thing about this mod is that you can set the weight of the loot, which will affect the physics of the car carrying it.

The sound is mediocre. Some little things are really neatly done, like the different engine sounds, hooters, rain noise, as well as the city-becoming announcers... unfortunately, most of the samples have just been taken from the first part.

So, Midtown Madness 2 is here, and I feel as if I were playing Midtown Madness 1.5. Was it the deadlines or what? Midtown Madness has great fortune that it has almost no competition in its genre, so that it will, probably just thanks to fans and gaming communities who are already working on new cars for it, sell quite well...