Review #463: The Simpsons - Hit & Run

 Now, if I could turn this opening line into a couch gag...

Yet another instance of Blue-Shirt Bart, even if he is nowhere to be found in the game.

 Now, join me on my trip back to the early 2000s, you with me? Grand Theft Auto 3 had released and now everything had to be a sandbox game. There was another franchise that just couldn't get enough of copying other games, first they aped Tony Hawk with their skateboarding game(It was really bad) and then they ripped off Crazy Taxi, they were so bold with they copying that Sega actually sued. Yes, it was the Simpsons, and not content with Sega's lawsuit, now they were gonna get their very own GTA game.

 Everything starts out with Springfield being invaded by a swarm of mechanical bees, and soon, a host of black vans start patrolling the city... and then Homer gets involved in it. The story claims to have been penned by The Simpsons writers, and maybe it was, but it wasn't particularly funny, but then again, this game came after their heyday. There're 7 stages with 7 main missions, 3 races and one bonus mission each, and on each stage you'll play as a different character: Homer(twice), Bart(twice), Lisa, Marge and.... Apu? It's a strange selection, a bit unfair too, that Homer and Bart get two stages while Lisa and Marge only get one, and why is Apu a playable character? In that case I'd rather get Krusty or someone else instead of another Bart stage, and Bart's pretty much my favorite character(Hey! I'm a 90s kid). Sadly, while there're 7 stages, there are only 3 maps. They are medium sized, certainly not as open as GTA, and while every time they are reused they receive little changes, it's still not enough, since most collectibles will be exactly where they were before, only the Cards and a few bees changing places.

Green arrows will point you in the right direction, years before GTA would adopt the mechanic.

 There's not much your Simpson character can do while on foot: X jumps and double jumps, Square kicks(You can't kill NPCs, only topple them, but you can break boxes or defeat the mechanical bees), circle dashes and triangle let's you get on any vehicle, this being a T for Teen game NPCs will gladly give you a ride on their car, you don't steal them! There're no weapons of any sort, nor is there a combat system, so as you could guess, 98% of the missions take place on wheels. There're only a handful of mission types: Get to X place on time, gather every item on time, race a vehicle, chase a vehicle, chase and smash onto a vehicle and gather what they drop or chase and destroy a vehicle(By smashing into it) before the time runs out. While it gets a bit predictable, it doesn't get too repetitive. The difficulty is all over the place, however, since some missions will be tougher than other subsequent ones for no reason at all. That said, most of the game is rather easy, and if you lose too much you'll be allowed to skip a mission.... save for the final one, which is hard as nails.

 Each stage has a decent amount of stuff to do in it. First and foremost, you'll want to smash everything you come into contact with to collect coins, which can be spent on costumes or extra vehicles. There're also 'gags' to find, which unlock nothing, 20 mechanical bees per stage to destroy(30 coins each, so you'll want to) and 7 trading cards per stage which unlock tracks for a silly isometrical racing mini-game(Up to four players!), as well as three optional races to partake in and a bonus mission that rewards you with a bonus car. One BIG problem comes with coins... money is pretty hard to come by unless you exploit the game, either by hitting without breaking every box and then reloading or turning on 'Invincible Car' and 'Cars explode on contact' to earn money by destroying vehicles. And you need money, every single stage requires you to buy at least one of the bonus cars, and sometimes you'll even need costumes. Unless you are gonna use cheats or exploits, ignore optional content unless you want to be stuck grinding for money.

If the car has a name, it's been on the show sometime before.

 As with any GTA clone, cause too much havoc and the police will come after you. You can't die(or kill), so you'll be fined 50 coins, which hurts a lot more than it sounds. Eventually this becomes the main source of the game's difficulty, since the missions themselves would be pretty easy had it not been because smashing into any object(except walls) will make the police siren gauge increase, so you'll be triggering the police pretty often during missions. It doesn't help that the game's physics are very floaty, and at times wonky, it's easy to lose control of your vehicle if you turn to hard, and drifting doesn't work too well. These are but some of the reasons that the last mission is so hard, but you also have to couple them with the fact that hitting a wall or a car hard enough will make the object you are carrying fall. And it's also a mission with two main parts, and losing on the second part means having to redo the entire first part(a race) again. There're quite a few of these 'two-part' missions without checkpoints, but the final mission is the only one in which it gets tedious.

 That said, as spotty as controls can be, as horrid as the framerate can get... Hit & Run is a fun game for the most part. Save the final mission, the game's difficulty, even on the harder missions, isn't so that the controls will make you lose a mission, heck, there's a lot of rubberbanding, if the enemy falls too far behind, they will catch up to you, but I also noticed that quite a few enemies would wait for me to catch up to them. And exploring the stages is very fun, even on my second visits, even when I realized that most stuff would be exactly where it was before, I was still having fun going from end to end. The dialogue, recorded by series' regulars, makes the game feel very legit, and a lot of care went into designing the game's three main worlds. The more you know about the Simpsons the more you'll like the game, since there're references to the lore everywhere, heck, every named car in the game appeared in some episode before, every single unlockable costume comes straight out of the series' itself.

Lisa tried to fit in with the cool crowd before. Hit & Run successfully managed to fit in with the GTA clones!

 The Simpsons - Hit & Run is easy to recommend to both fans of the show and people that don't care about it. Fans will get tons of references and allusions to the show, a game that makes the most of the license and stays true to it. Non-fans will get a watered-down, but mostly competent GTA clone that, unlike other gritty, realistic clones('Just Cause', 'True Crime', 'The Getaway'... I could go on), has a very cartoony take on it and doesn't take seriously, making it feel very fresh and different in comparison.
 7.0 out of 10