And there are points where you will get stuck over and over again.
It's like a compilation of imitations of other, better games. The work undercover mode adds a bit of variety, involving ferrying passengers about at crazy speeds, and working as a stunt driver, but again it just lack a certain something. The checkpoint races are largely generic, and although finally completing them brings some satisfaction, its short lived. The latest in the Midtown Madness franchise allows you to get behind the wheel of more than 30 vehicles and compete in exciting race modes such as Blitz, Checkpoint, and Cruise. The checkpoint Infuriating trials, tedious repetition, and endlessly ramming yourself on the curb. Midtown Madness 3 provides you with madcap, over-the-top racing and driving excitement in two of the world's most fascinating cities: Paris and Washington, D.C. This game only gets a 2 out of 10 from me because of the two-player mode.Infuriating trials, tedious repetition, and endlessly ramming yourself on the curb. Sure, it is set in the middle of a town, and it may well be the third game in the series, but the madness part is very highly questionable. In short, the game borders on false advertising, especially since pedestrians cannot be run over and cars cannot be totalled in an assaultive style.
Nobody is going to want to bother playing all of the single-player levels in order to unlock them, but they make the two-player mode so much more fun.
This is the only genuinely fun part of the game, as well as the reason why the code to unlock all the cars and tracks is so frequently used.
About the only salvation for the game is the two-player mode, in which the two players race cars through a series of checkpoints in order to see who can get through in the quickest time. The voiceovers, quite obviously done by the programmers, are insulting and annoying enough to prompt throwing the controller at the display. The disciplinarian style of the game gets in the way of any fun whatsoever, and insult is added to injury when you're in the undercover mode and should happen to fail a level. This in itself is not so bad, but the problem is that if you should take so much as one late turn or one roll off the middle of the track, you can count on losing, and thus not progressing at all in the game. All of the races involve racing down a very strict and narrow path through checkpoints. My favorite vehicle of Midtown Madness is the Police Mustang and the Panoz GTR-1 because it was pretty fast and had the 'Secret Shadow' color. This is exactly what doesn't make Midtown Madness 3 any fun. Players were free to go anywhere and do anything they liked so long as they eventually completed one of three goals in each level. What made Carmageddon fun was the total freedom it allowed. It tries very hard to create an atmosphere, but what it eventually comes off as is a very tryhard Carmageddon.
To put it in a nutshell, this is one of those games that they give away for free (being part of the X-Box Beast Pack) because people would get very ticked off if they were made to fork out a good hundred dollars for it.