Midtown Madness 3 Mobile

If only real life was exciting as it is in video games. Instead of popping out for a pint of milk and getting stuck in traffic, you would swerve your souped-up car through the queues, barely scraping the paintwork, capture armed villains en route, and end up getting your daily pint plus a £100,000 reward. We suspect that those kinds of thoughts were going through the developer's minds when they crafted Midtown Madness 3 Mobile.

Originally released on the consoles and PC, it was perhaps inevitable that the game should end up on our favourite format sooner or later. It's also one of the first of a crop of games to use the new software extensions known as EGE (see here for more info), which is one of the ways that the gaming industry is trying to enhance the pocket gaming experience.

So has MM3 Mobile managed to live up to its potential? Well, not entirely. The first thing that strikes you is the in-game visuals. If you take a look at the screenshots you'll see that everything is viewed from a birds-eye perspective, and quite a high-flying one at that. Pedestrians are therefore reduced to tiny yellow blobs, traffic lights to tiny multi-coloured blobs, and so on and so forth.

We're not saying that it would be possible – or even desirable – to model all the detail that MM3 Mobile crams in to its virtual Paris streets in 3D, given today's technology. But the current look does force you into a constant squint while playing! It also makes you wish you had a high-falutin' handset that's capable of playing the 3D version of the game that's available for mobile phones, which is a completely different experience to this.

The challenges that you face vary from picking up wounded patients in an ambulance to making deliveries and racing through checkpoints dotted around the city. Now, you might not always be able to see where you're going: but not to worry, the vehicles that you zoom around in are all made out of some kind of indestructible alloy. And the weird thing is that you don't have to worry about other road users: you can just ram them off the road with no deviation to your course, and only a tiny drop in speed.

As a result, there isn't much challenge in completing any of the missions, and you'll probably see all that the game has to offer in an hour or so. That doesn't mean it's not fun to play. There's satisfaction to be had weaving through the traffic, the vehicle handling feels good, and all the missions are against the clock, adding some much-needed pressure to the proceedings. It's just that we expected a little more from the game; after all, a fair amount of thought has gone into Midtown Madness 3 Mobile and there are opportunities that could have been made more of.

Maybe if the developers had crammed in a few more mission types, tweaked the controls a bit (you can't accelerate and steer at the same time!) and given you an incentive to drive more carefully, then this would have warranted a much higher score. As it is, it's worth a quick bash, after which you are unlikely to play again.