This brings us to the U-Drive-It (UDI) feature of Rush Hour. With UDI, you
can take the controls of various vehicles on land, on sea, and in the air. The
game allows you to control a wide variety of vehicles that include basic ones
like school busses and garbage trucks and more exciting ones such as tanks and
attack helicopters. However, most of the vehicles will require certain
structures before being made available, so don’t expect to take a tank on a joy
ride unless there is an army base in your city. You control the vehicles with
the keyboard using the WASD keys, and a vehicle specific key menu appears on
screen to let you know how to use your vehicle’s special features such as the
water cannon on a fire truck.
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| The skywriting plane is too difficult to fly to write anything more legible than an "x". |
You’re free to take over any of the available vehicles at any time and go for
a drive through your city, but the game also provides you with some
vehicle-based missions to give your excursions a purpose. Completing a mission
successfully will reward you with a bonus to your mayor rating or unlock a new
structure. There is no penalty for failure so you’re free to keep trying a
mission until you complete it. Some missions also feature an “evil” alternate
that will cost you some mayor rating points but will result in financial gain.
For example, you can use a fire truck to rescue some cats stuck in trees, but do
you help them down or do you use the hose to knock them out of the trees?
Missions are played against a clock and if you complete the objectives in time
without wrecking your vehicle you’ll succeed in completing the mission.
The biggest problem with UDI is that the game’s engine was simply not
designed for a driving game. Collision detection is inconsistent, and you’re
never sure which part of a building tile you can pass through and which will
stop your vehicle with a crash. Also, the game generates cars on the streets to
represent traffic problems, and these cars can appear and disappear at any time.
This is not an issue when running your city, but it can make driving difficult
when cars can appear on top of you at any moment. There are also problems with
the graphics when driving from a zoomed in view. Buildings and other features
can break down into a pixilated mess while you go driving down the streets, with
bridge crossings being particularly problematic for the game.
Flying planes is even more difficult to master. Planes take wide sweeping
turns and tend to bounce off of tall buildings in random directions, which can
make it difficult to reach some sites to complete the aircraft missions. Trains
and boats? Well they’re actually pretty boring to drive, especially the trains.
You can control the train’s speed and any track switches, but you’re really
limited to watching the train run your track circuits. You can do this without
taking control of the trains.
The bottom-line with the UDI feature is that most players will give it a try
and then go back to managing their cities when the novelty wears off. If you
found yourself overwhelmed with SimCity 4’s micromanagement and difficulty
level, then this feature will not breathe new life into the game for you on its
own. This is especially true because most of the vehicles will not even be
available until you build up a large and thriving city, and this includes all of
the more interesting vehicles such as the tank and attack chopper.
If you enjoy SimCity 4, you’re sure to like the new tools and transportation
options in Rush Hour. If you found SimCity 4 to be too difficult or to require
too much micromanagement, then Rush Hour is probably not for you. The U-Drive-It
feature does not add enough to the game on its own to justify the purchase of
Rush Hour.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
82%. Rush Hour provides some great new tools and transportation
options for fans of the original game.
System Requirements: SimCity 4; Pentium III 500; 128 MB RAM;
32 MB
Video RAM; 8x CD-ROM; 1.6 GB Hard Drive
Space; Mouse.
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