Let’s cut to the chase: The Simpsons: Hit and Run is the best Simpsons video game ever made.
Of course, that’s less enthusiastic praise than it sounds. In fact, it’s more like describing your most pleasant root canal or your favorite trip to the DMV. Much like Bart Simpson himself, the catalog of Simpsons video games could easily be described as underachievers and proud of it. Most Simpsons games, with very few exceptions, have been blatant rip-offs of the popular video game du jour, and ranged in quality from poor (like Simpsons Road Rage) to downright abysmal (last year’s Simpsons Skateboarding immediately comes to mind).
Needless to say, then, whenever a new Simpsons video game comes out, the expectations are extremely low. So when a decent game like The Simpsons: Hit and Run is compared against these low standards, it really doesn’t take much to stand out from the crowd. That said, Hit and Run isn’t a perfect or even a great game, to be sure, but it’s a decent game, and that’s about as much as can be expected from a Simpsons video game.
Keeping with the tradition of taking the most popular game of the day and working The Simpsons into it, Hit and Run borrows heavily on the Grand Theft Auto formula. Basically, you get into a car and drive around a video representation of Springfield looking for missions to complete. Of course, Hit and Run is much more linear than Grand Theft Auto; there are seven levels, each featuring a different character (except for the last two, which feature Bart and Homer for a second time), and consisting of seven missions which must be completed in order to progress to the next level. There are bonus missions and other things to do in Springfield in between missions, but the meat of the game is in completing each mission to get to the next one.
The story of the game is actually written by Simpsons writers, and plays out like a Simpsons episode in that the events of the beginning of the game have very little to do with what ends up happening at the end of the story. That being said, to spoil the story would be to ruin much of the fun. However, while the story often sacrifices continuity in order to accommodate a given mission, it does make sense as the game progresses, and find out what happens next is actually somewhat of a motivation to keep progressing through the game.
That motivation is welcome given the difficulty of some of the missions. The missions seem varied at first but then start to repeat with minor differences as the game progresses. In general, you need to follow a car, destroy a car, get away from a car, collect objects around the level, or some combination of the above. For example, some missions will have you hitting a car a set number of times and collecting the objects that fall out, or following a car and picking up objects that are dropped at certain intervals. Around the end of the third level, however, the missions begin to get frustratingly difficult, with time limits constructed with the bare minimum of leeway. This is one of those games that will have your controller flying across the room after a while. The designers wisely included the option to skip a mission after a certain number of unsuccessful tries, but that still doesn’t counter the fact that some of the missions are so difficult that they hardly seem possible. I daresay that most players will not get to the end of the game to see what happens in the story, just because it is not worth the frustration to do so.
One of the side activities that one can do during and in between missions is collecting coins, which the player can use to purchase a variety of new vehicles and costumes for the characters. There is definitely something to be said for careening around town in Mr. Plow or the Springfield Elementary school bus with Lisa dressed as the state of Florida or a nearly nude “casual” Homer. The only problem here is that you are occasionally required to purchase one of these costumes or cars in order to progress. Purchasing a car is usually not a big deal, since the cars you’re required to buy are generally decent, but having to spend your hard earned money you’ve been saving for a better car on a worthless costume can be fairly irritating. It’s even worse when you don’t have enough cash and have to spend an hour or so wandering around town looking for things to smash and get coins from.
These complaints aside, though, the game is actually quite a bit of fun. It’s entertaining to careen around city streets in the Simpsons’ family sedan, causing rampant property damage and occasionally running from the cops. It should be noted that the police awareness is handled differently in Hit and Run than in GTA. There is only one level of police irritation in this game, and it takes quite a bit of mayhem to get them to leave the proverbial donut shop, but once they do, they come out with a vengeance and are tough to avoid. Luckily, the worst that happens is that, if they catch you, you lose 50 coins and continue about your business. In other words, the police are more of a nuisance than anything else.
The other thing that makes this game so much more fun than any other Simpsons game is the level of detail with which the representation of Springfield is created, with a plethora of episode references scattered about, waiting for the player to discover them. I actually laughed out of nostalgia at some of the billboards scattered around, like, “Now leaving area code 636, now entering area code 939,” and, “Don’t eat beef. Eat deer.” Add to that the fact that the areas are actually one contiguous city, connected by freeways (including the fabled Matlock Expressway), and this is the first time where the game world has actually felt like Springfield instead of a collection of areas loosely based on Springfield.
The game controls as one would expect, though the control is not quite as responsive as I would have liked. Standard driving game controls apply (in the tutorial level, in fact, Bart describes the controls as, “Just like every driving game, ever…”). Other than occasionally mixing up the hand brake and normal brake controls in-game, the control felt extremely natural throughout. The cars, on the whole, handle poorly, however; even cars with a five-star handling rating feel loose and fairly unresponsive. Combining this with the missions’ tight time limits creates a recipe for frustration.
Graphically, the game is something of a mixed bag. Everything is rendered nicely, even though there’s still something about the Simpsons rendered in 3D that looks sort of off. The problem here, though is that the framerate is occasionally extremely choppy. In some high-speed missions, the framerate was so poor that I had to stop playing for a few minutes to keep from getting a splitting headache. There are also some clipping issues occasionally, but those pale in comparison to the framerate. That aside, though, the game looks nice, and really follows the television show’s style to look as one would expect the 2D world of the Simpsons would look when translated into 3D.
The sound, however, is nearly flawless. Voice clips are recorded by the television actors specifically for the game, and sound like you’re watching the show. There are some exclamations that the characters shout while driving that tend to get repetitive after a while, but they’re not all that bad, and you only play one character for a few missions at a time anyway. The music is good as well, adapting for each character; for example, Lisa’s music is a jazz version of the Simpsons theme, which is a nice touch. While it can get old after a little while, Hit and Run does the best job of any Simpsons game in recent memory of not crossing the line from funny to obnoxious.
Overall, The Simpsons: Hit and Run is not the best game ever made. In fact, it’s probably only slightly better than average. As far as Simpsons games go, however, this is the first game that I’ve played after which I didn’t feel cheated as a Simpsons fan. Sure, it has its problems. Sure, fundamentally, it’s a sub-par rip-off of Grand Theft Auto. It’s fun for a rental period, and isn’t that about all we can ask from The Simpsons?
