Midtown Madness 2

Midtown Madness 2 Preview


After giving you the chance to ramraid your way around Chicago in the original game, Angel Studios now make a welcome return to the urban grid with Midtown Madness 2, which allows you to emulate London's, ahem, beloved Hackney Carriage jockeys by jumping into a black cab and swerving indiscriminately through the streets of our very own Big Smoke.

With this beta build we were able to check out most of the features of the final game, although there remained some clipping problems and the odd map bug here and there. All the options of the original remain: Circuit is the most conventional choice - a twisting course around the streets is marked out for you, Blitz is point-to-point racing mayhem, Checkpoint keeps you on your toes as you search for the next gate and Cruise lets you explore the map at your own pace. In addition you get a new game style, Crash Course.

In this mode you take on a series of challenges which aim to teach you the skills you'll need to compete in the game - er, going fast, turning in the right places, not hitting buildings... that sort of thing. There's a daring jump across the Thames using Tower Bridge for a ramp, one where you get to "follow that cab" and even a Speed-style challenge where you mustn't slow down (no bombs though - shame). If you were being picky you might consider a comparison with Need for Speed: Porsche 2000's Factory Driver mode, but we'll let that drop for now.

In addition to the London backdrop, you also get the opportunity to abuse your suspension on the hilly streets of San Francisco. Taking the freeway is just as dull as you'd expect (unless you have a go at an oncoming traffic slalom) but the real fun lies in pretending to be Steve McQueen as you bounce up and down those precipitous gradients. But for most of us Limeys who wouldn't know the Golden Gate Bridge from a jar of Golden Syrup, the real attraction is going to be the thought of breaking the speed limit around the monuments of our nation's capital.

The London map is a stylised representation of the city, featuring the usual landmarks - Big Ben, St Paul's, Trafalgar Square and so forth. You can even take a shortcut through the underground system if the mood takes you, through tunnels devoid of trains - so it's quite realistic then. This isn't a sim though, so you're not going to be able to whip out your A to Z and park up outside your bijou studio flat in Camden to check out how accurately they have modelled your front room. The routes are truncated so that you can get from the Royal Albert Hall to Buckingham Palace and on to the Tower of London without having to negotiate much more than a corner or two on the way.

The novelty of these games remains that rather than giving you a single route between you and your goal, you can, if you so wish, veer off at any time and try your own route plan - across curbs, grass, and even shallow lakes if you feel the urge. The computer cars too can take any path they fancy and often in races there can be two or three separate groups exploring differing routes, which makes for some manic action, with head-on collisions all too frequent as cars approach the same checkpoint from several directions.

There's an interesting variety of cars - many from the original game but also nine new ones to spice things up a bit, from that groovy sixties classic the Mini Cooper (complete with checkerboard roof) to a red London double-decker and the aforementioned black cab. Some of the challenges in this build were a bit odd - in one case your task was to crash your vehicle repeatedly into a church in order to reach the checkpoints. It seemed more like the sort of thing a designer would knock up when bored one lunchtime than a fully-thought out piece of level design, so we'll be curious to see if it makes it into the final release.

Midtown Madness 2 is slated for release sometime towards the end of the year, and while there were some flaws in the version that we've seen, it looks to be well on the way to meeting that deadline. In the meantime, we'll have to content ourselves with sitting in traffic jams and dream of taking a detour up the curb and leaving burning-rubber tracks around the Albert Memorial…