Midtown Madness 3’s single play mode is decent but not overwhelming. You have two single player modes modes, Single Race and Undercover. Single Race is broken into three parts, Cruise, Blitz, and Checkpoint. Cruise allows you to explore the city on your own with little interruption (you can add the police if you want to be chased around the city, although the police just seem intent on damaging your car rather than actually arresting you). Why would you want to just drive around Paris or DC? Two reasons, the first is to familiarize your self with the city and the second is to pick the extra paint jobs for the cars in the game. The only catch to this is that you must be driving the vehicle that the paint job links to (i.e. you can’t pick up the new paintjob for the Chrysler Crossfire while driving the Mini Cooper S). This is a little frustrating since you’ll have to unlock the car and then go hunting for the paint job for that car.
The Blitz is you versus the clock as you have to complete short races in the shortest amount of time with the time being based on which car you pick. The Checkpoint mode is you racing against the computer in short courses. For both Blitz and Checkpoint you must complete certain parts of the Undercover mode to unlock additional races.
The bulk of the Single Player mode is the Undercover mode where you are an undercover agent and you must work your way through a series of missions. There’s a little bit of plot wrapped around the missions (something to do with a shadowy guy in a hat giving you missions) but the missions themselves are basically you trying to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Some of these are races against other drivers, some of them are Taxi cab missions, but for the most part it’s getting from point A to point B. There are several dozen missions spread across the two cities with each city having it’s own central theme. Completing the Undercover missions unlocks cars, Blitz and Checkpoint maps but there really isn’t a lot of incentive to do so unless you really want to.
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