Midtown Madness 3 3D Review

Midtown Madness 3 3D is a quasi-port of the Xbox racer, which was one of the better Xbox Live games of 2003. The mobile version features only the scantest connectivity options (score uploads), though, and limits you to single-player relay and checkpoint races through downtown Paris. Even the game's better vehicles are on the slow side, and the controls aren't as responsive as they should be. Midtown Madness is a fair effort, but it's hardly thrilling.

In-Fusio has provided these authentic French accents.

In Midtown Madness, you compete against the road rage-afflicted in the City of Love. Historic landmarks abound, and the city's wide squares and blue-gray apartment buildings are evident. Most of Cybiko's graphical effort has gone into the modeling of its cars, including the Mini Cooper S that is iconic of the Midtown Madness franchise.

MM3D's core challenge lies in making tight turns around city blocks. During the races, you'll have to tear through city blocks to reach checkpoints on your minimap screen. In career mode, these checkpoints take the form of medical trauma victims or wooden crates. You start the game as a crazy ambulance driver, but you're quickly promoted to parcel delivery. After a few rounds of both, the career mode seems to abruptly end, only giving you the option to restart your last delivery race. Checkpoint and blitz modes play almost identically and are a little more robust. Success in all three modes unlocks cars and new arrondissements for your racing pleasure. It's almost as though you are meant to start with career mode, move on to checkpoint, and then tackle blitz. The modes are successive in difficulty, rather than equal and complementary.

Midtown's software-rendered 3D environment looks good overall, but the engine's frame rate leaves something to be desired. Your speedometer is the only evidence that your vehicle is moving quickly. The game's controls seem to suffer from lag as well, and turning isn't exactly a painless process. At points, it seems like the game will skip a few frames, and your bumper will be fused to a car somewhere. We say "fused" because, a few times, we found our cars literally stuck in the environment--probably due to shoddy collision detection.

Instead of playing this game, rent the French film Taxi 2, which has the same premise.

During play, you'll hear some of the most annoying sound effects ever. It's almost a feat of engineering. Even with the volume on the lowest settings, it felt like the screeching and moaning vehicles were inside our brains. The game's splash screen menu features some comparably pleasant techno-funk music.

Software rendering is rarely good enough to support a racing game. When speed is central to gameplay, having a high frame rate and rock-solid controls are paramount. These performance issues on the LG VX8000 make Midtown Madness 3 3D less than enjoyable and inferior to the 2D version released earlier this year.