Take away the excess violence and hookers, and you'll have The Simpsons: Hit and Run. The car handling is somewhat sluggish compared with other driving titles and the camera often wanders off into uncharted territory when you go on foot -especially in the uninspiring platform sections.Īt first glance, The The Simpsons: Hit and Run looks like a Grand Theft Auto 3 clone, and in many ways it is. Yet, despite that, Hit & Run actually turns out to have a great deal of charm - even though it'll probably only entertain you for a day or two at most. Some PC gamers will hate the idea of The Simpsons: Hit & Run - basically, that it unashamedly uses the GTA model and jemmies The Simpsons licence into it. But you can also stop and get in any car you like, such as Comic Book Guy's Fat-mobile, although in a distinctly crime-free twist, you sit in the passenger seat next to the character. However, you also have the Hit & Run random element from the game's title, which involves a hectic car chase around Springfield if you commit a crime within donut-eating distance of Police Chief Wiggum - get caught, and you're busted and slapped with a heavy fine.Įach of the playable characters has access to over 40 vehicles from the show, including Homer's Mr Plow snow vehicle and Cletus the slack-jawed yokel's pick-up truck. In addition to the main sections, there are a heap of bonus missions you can complete, which include street racing, destroying flying waspcams (part of the ridiculous plot), pulling off successful visual gags and finding special Collector Cards (see 'Worst. Navigating around Springfield is simple enough with ap in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, but just to make sure, developer Radical has placed giant green arrows on the road pointing you in the right direction. Hit & Run's gameplay is generally based around simple story-driven missions for the main characters of Bart, Lisa, Homer, Marge and Apu, involving timed tasks, ranging from collecting copies of the violent videogame Bonestorm II by crashing the Simpson family car into the delivery van, to rounding up escaped simians from Dr Nick's Screaming Monkey Medical Research ntre. Then there's the fantastic voiceacting from Dan Castellaneta and all the regular cast from The Simpsons, with some genuinely laugh-out-loud dialogue created by the series' writers, including Homer's aside about stupid Flanders getting happiness from religion and Principal Skinner's warning to Bart that he'll get him just like I got Charlie in 'Nam'.Ĭertain phrases start to grind after a while (Bart's don't have a cow, man' springs to mind), but there's enough variety to keep you playing in search of more sick jokes and brutal one-liners.

The simpsons game review