The joys of rampaging through city traffic. Midtown Madness hits the Xbox, and the virtual streets of Paris and Washington DC.

Midtown Madness 3 is a fun street-racing game that mixes objectives from Sega’s Crazy Taxi with standard street racing. The story mode gives some absurd backdrop of being a private investigator who must impersonate various vehicle-based jobs like taxi driver, cars salesman, stunt car driver, policeman, limo driver, paramedic or a pizza delivery guy. It hardly matters though, since the gameplay consists solely of racing through the streets trying to hit checkpoints, usually with a competitor in hot pursuit (similar to TG Daredevil for the PS2)

If all you want is a cool driving game without an emphasis on violence, yet still laden with destructive opportunities, Madness delivers. There’s a lot of cars to select, unlock, and drive around at highly unsafe speeds, and all the cars have a noticeably unique feel to them. The arcade handling is responsive and highly entertaining (but don’t expect realism), and there’s a ton of things to run into and destroy including other cars, lampposts, fences, and storefront windows.

The freedom to just drive around, hit checkpoints, or go undercover and do some crazy missions? That’s the sweet spot and is what Midtown Madness 3 exceeded at. Winning races or completing missions earns you new wheels to cruise with, along with more races and missions. There’s no shortage of sites to see through the game’s two picturesque cities, either. In fact, this overload of missions, races, and game modes is really the high point. Want to just aimlessly cruise through Paris? You can even do it with a friend in the multiplayer mode. Straight racing by yourself or with pals is another option, and the game will even adjust its time limits based on the car you drive since the Mini Cooper can make far better tracks than a truck.

Visually, Midtown Madness is solid. The cars are detailed and shiny, offering impressive textures that the PS2 would cry for. The cities look excellent and the pedestrians look mostly human. The audio is fun, with great engine effects and ambient noises, and a zippy soundtrack. It really does take advantage of the Xbox sound processing capabilities, and has aged well even for today.

Multiplayer action thankfully includes Xbox Live support, along with system link, and a two-player split screen mode. There is also DLC available, which has long since been discontinued by Microsoft but has been preserved by the community. Online play is possible thanks to the Insignia project, although you will be lucky to find a lobby.

Even if you get bored with the 30-plus cars and a horde of missions and races, finding fun things to run over with friends never gets old. You can’t run over anyone, Pedestrians either leap out of the way or pass right through the car undamaged — including the mimes. The AI can be a bit… let’s say, braindead. Sometimes, it feels like you’re racing against NPCs that just learned what a steering wheel is. And the environments, while cool, get repetitive. After a while, you’ve seen all there is to see in both cities.

While there are other, more intense and innovative racers out there (Apex/Forza/PGR to name a few), Midtown Madness 3 is a fun and friendlier approach to street racing. You can crash into virtually anything and cause oodles of destruction with no penalty due to the cars being invulnerable. The fast-paced weaving through the streets of two different cities holds a wealth of interesting gameplay, and its fairly accurate to the city the level is based on.

Sadly the game wasn’t made compatible with the Xbox One or Series consoles. The only reason I can think of is due to the vehicle brands which is a shame, this would play and look very well though their emulator. Again this was one of the few titles that was only released for the original Xbox.