There are few sure things in life, but one of them is that if Microsoft puts out a racing game with “Madness” in the title, you might as well grab it as soon as it hits store shelves. Midtown Madness 2 is no exception to this rule. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a hard-core simulation fan or you simply crave speed, destruction, and mayhem in your games – if you want to play a very fun racing game, then Midtown Madness 2 is for you.
But that’s not to say that Midtown Madness 2 is ideal. In fact, it seems as though it could have used a couple more weeks in testing. On several occasions the game completely locked up on a fairly standard system , and only through uninstalling and reinstalling did the problem finally seem to go away. As in some other racing games, the brakes don’t truly function as real-life brakes when both pedals are configured to use the y-axis: Slamming on the pedal doesn’t lock the wheels but merely decelerates your car more quickly. An attempt to correct this by configuring the pedals to use two axes revealed a bug – the brakes worked in reverse, forcing you to keep the pedal down for no brakes and releasing it to stop. Your only true braking option is the hand brake, which tends to cause unpredictable slides when all you really want to do is slow down in a hurry. Also, at the beginning of one race, my car was positioned facing in the opposite direction of the other cars, and stepping on the gas sent me hurtling backward along with them even though I was in first gear. Fortunately, none of these problems were persistent or detrimental to how enjoyable the game turns out to be.
