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Well, give 'em this--they finally did it, finally gave us a fully-roamable, truly 3D Springfield chopped up into the six large areas of Evergreen Terrace, the Entertainment District, the Springfield Dam, Downtown, the Springfield Mountains and, of course, the Springfield nuke plant. The very world itself is the best part of Simpsons Road Rage: Clearly designed by people who by-God know their Simpsons minutiae, the various neighborhoods of Springfield are jammed to the curbside with hundreds of landmarks, references and in-jokes laid out to the best of our consensual knowledge. Keep your eyes peeled as you drive around and you'll see not only the expected hotspots like the Kwik-E-Mart or Moe's Tavern, but obscure oddities like the Stonecutters lodge, the Little Black Box airport bar, the "She-She" lounge, the crumbling remains of the Springfield Monorail system, and even the Escalator to Nowhere (and yes, you can jump off that sucker, too). Coming up on your left are the famous "Don't Eat Beef/Eat Deer" billboards, and featured daily in the Springfield Coliseum...it's Truckasaurus! It's difficult if not impossible to take all this in while power-sliding to a stop at your destination at 90 mph, however, so there's a Sunday Drive mode which allows you to tool around at your own pace, checking out the wealth of environmental detail. Enjoy that detail, too--because beyond the over-and-over-again taxi-runs, there's not much else here. The ten "missions" that feature specific driver/vehicle combos (Lisa's slow Elec-Taurus, for example, or Grampa's zippy Shriner's car, or Snake's Lil' Bandit) are essentially the same short game packaged ten different ways, and a halfway-skilled gamer can literally rip through them all in an hour. Zing! That's it! What's left? Well, Road Rage does feature a two-player split-screen option, which is mildly interesting. But I can't not think of all the marvelous detail in these environments, all the potential for mission-based variety, gone largely to waste here. The streets are "interactive" in the sense that every last street lamp, trash can and bus stop can be smashed here--but with the exception of Burns Bus Stops (whose destruction earns you a few seconds), none of these "interactive" elements really add up to much. Occasional monetary targets unlock the six neighborhoods one by one, as well as new drivers and vehicles (and alternate vehicles, as is the case with Homer and his alternate car, the gawd-awful hideous "Homer" marketed by his entrepreneur half-brother). Mechanically, the game is excellent; the vehicles handle terrifically, sliding into J-turn stops with a push of the brake button. Other cars and street objects fly around as you crash into them. If anything, the vehicles and debris of Springfield are a little too giving, as even larger vehicles don't seem to put up much of a fight. The exception is Mr. Burn's gold-trimmed limo (convertible-chopped like everything else), which can ram you off your course, wasting time in a game where literally every second counts. One problem is that, while the voice talent is excellent and characters even "recognize" each other, the samples play out pretty quickly, and often inanely (or even disturbingly--once, as Homer, I picked up Milhouse who whined that he had to go home to "regroup from a wedgie"...at which point Homer cried a creepily-enthusiastic "Oooh! Can I come?!" Brrrrrr.) One other problem of note is that yawning, galactic load-time between levels. You can literally spend more time waiting for a level-load than you will spend playing the level itself. I guess we had to pay for those huge, sprawling free-roaming levels somewhere, though. Road Rage is an excellent-looking, perfect-sounding, perfectly-playable arcade game, albeit one of many missed opportunities. If you love Crazy Taxi or the Simpsons or both, you certainly can't miss if you want a good rental, but only reasonably hard-core Simpsons fans will likely need to own this one, mostly for the thoroughly-roamable Springfield Streets. I'm still a little stunned that attention to detail on this awesome a scale was married to such clone-and-bone gameplay by the developers who clearly know and love their subject matter, but maybe they were just having an off couple of months. I am reminded of the wise words of Homer J. Simpson, Esq., on the subject of temporary job dissatisfaction: "If you don't like your job, you don't strike! You just go in, every day, and do it really half-assed! That's the American Way!" OVERALL:7.0/10.0 |
