If you enjoyed this The Simpsons: Road Rage review, you're encouraged to discuss it with the author and with other members of the site's community. If you don't already have an HonestGamers account, you can sign up for one in a snap. Thank you for reading!
Taking to the roads of Springfield for the first time you only have access to one neighbourhood - Evergreen Terrace, home to Springfield Elementary School and the Kwik-E-Mart amongst other landmarks. You're also initially limited to a choice of the five main Simpson family members as your driver, including Lisa in an electric car and Marge's gas guzzling Canyonero. The rest of the game's neighbourhoods and vehicles must be unlocked by earning enough cash in the main Road Rage mode, which can be a rather tedious undertaking. You need several hundred thousand dollars to unlock everything, and a cool $1,000,000 to defeat Mr Burns' plans and complete the game outright. Bizarrely I actually found the tougher difficulty levels far easier than the .. er .. easy option - the tighter time limits are more than compensated for by the higher fares you charge your passengers - but whichever level you choose to play on, you'll be hard pushed to earn much more than $10,000 in a single run without cheating. Given that you only have six neighbourhoods to drive around, this means constantly circling the same few square miles of town over and over again just to unlock a few more drivers and the rest of the levels. A little more variety would have been welcome. The same goes for the voice acting. From Professor Frink, the fat comic store owner and Springfield's leading quack Dr Nick to the well-spoken kleptomaniac Snake and bumbling Police Chief Wiggum, many of the best loved Simpsons regulars are included in the game, with voices provided by the original actors. The bad news is that there's a relatively limited set of lines on offer for each, and as you hear at least two of them in any given car journey, after a few hours they may start to get a little grating.
Simpsons Road Rage Ps2
If you want a break from the mayhem there's not much on offer in the way of alternative game modes either. Sunday Drive lets you tootle around in your own good time, giving you an opportunity to hunt for shortcuts, learn the layout of the maps and admire the scenery, but without any kind of time pressure or scoring system it soon gets dull. There's also a Mission mode, but this merely consists of a linear series of ten tasks. Most can be finished within two or three attempts, and all feature a time limit of under a minute, which makes this option rather shortlived. The tasks are also incredibly repetitive, as eight of the ten involve knocking over a certain number of specified objects, whether it's a drunken Barney running down mascots or Otto smashing into lamp posts in the school bus. The other two are simply a case of getting from A to B without being run off the road by Mr Burns. To make matters worse, traffic is entirely random, so you could lose before you've even got into gear because a bus has parked itself in front of your starting position. It's an amusing enough diversion from the Road Rage mode, but it isn't likely to occupy you for long. Finally there's the fast and furious two player split-screen option, which sets you and a friend loose on the streets of Springfield in a duel to see who can reach the target fare total first. To make things more interesting, you must both fight over the same punter, so if your opponent gets to them first you'll have to smash into the car to hijack their passenger and complete the ride.
Overall, the gameplay, while not awful, is not amazing and gets old quickly. The cars themselves drive very quickly and turn quickly, though perhaps to quickly, there are many moments where you take a corner to quick and lose your path and must recover often wasting time. There's also some very sketchy hitboxes between cars, items, and buildings, as there are many times where a small piece of debris can get you stuck and you must mess with your car or reset your position to get out of it, same with buildings, as hitting corners can also get you stuck. Raising money's not very difficult, as in each playthrough you can get a good $10000 if your quick enough, and it's not very difficult to master either. Thus the easy difficulty makes it very tedious. There's also the lackluster mission mode, no clever mission, with all of them consisting of you hit X amount of Y in Z amount of time. Only three levels really take advantage of the game's main gimmick. The mission's aren't very hard either, as you have enough time to complete them and there's usually an infinite amount of items to destroy, and whether you accomplish them depends on where you are if you're in a lucky place. The absolute worst mission is Lisa's mission, which consists of her destroying groups of tree's in a small amount of time, and unlike the other mission's there's a finite amount of logs to destroy as well as a fork in the road, with both roads containing a group of logs, and there just isn't enough time to get through the other fork and is near impossible to make. I swear no matter how I approached the level I could never find away to complete it in time. Then there's also the fact that if you lose/restart a mission enough times you can skip it completely and move on to the next one, and unlike The Simpsons Hit & Run, these DO count as a completed mission, thus making doing these missions a waste of time.
Developer(s): Fox InteractivePublisher(s): Electronic ArtsGenre: RacingWikipedia: LinkGame review links: IGN: 5.1/10, Metacritic: 64/100Game description: Mr. Burns is up to his greedy ways in Simpsons Road Rage, purchasing Springfield's busses and jacking up the fares. Now, Springfield residents must turn their cars into cabs and work the streets. Hopefully, making enough money to buy back the busses before the clock runs out. Choose from over 30 of your favorite Simpsons characters and brave the jam-packed streets of six huge levels, performing big-air and powerslide stunts. Compete for passengers in two-player, split screen action. Go on a road rage, Simpsons-style.A clone of Crazy Taxi with The Simpsons characters. Like the show, this game takes place in Springfield. The main objective is to successfully drop off as many passengers as possible within the time limit.
More than 25 Simpsons series characters climb behind the wheel or wander the streets begging for a ride. Careen through timesaving shortcuts and take on terrain that includes hills, mountains and forests. Wreak havoc in five Springfield neighborhoods that include landmarks such as Moe's Bar and the nuclear power plant. Busy traffic and wayward pedestrians confound your rage. However, two-wheel leans, speed-starts, power slides and other cool car-physics help you release that rage.
Condition: Pre-OwnedCase: Original CaseBooklet: Original Booklet IncludedDisc: Fair - Some Scratches or MarksPlayers: 1-2Game Description: Mr. Burns is up to his greedy ways in Simpsons Road Rage, purchasing Springfield's busses and jacking up the fares. Now, Springfield residents must turn their cars into cabs and work the streets. Hopefully, making enough money to buy back the busses before the clock runs out. Choose from over 30 of your favorite Simpsons characters and brave the jam-packed streets of six huge levels, performing big-air and powerslide stunts. Compete for passengers in two-player, split screen action. Go on a road rage, Simpsons-style. Pre-Owned Guarantee: All pre-owned games and consoles are covered by our 30 day money back guarantee so you can buy with confidence.
Mr. Burns is up to his greedy ways again, purchasing the Springfield Transit Corporation and jacking up the fares. Refusing to shell out the high rates, Springfield citizens are forced into humorous Simpsons' "road rage" as they brave commuters, jam-packed back-routes and the challenge to make enough money to buy back the Transit Corporation before time runs out. No time for donuts, Homer. 2ff7e9595c
Comments