Cruise through Springfield as your favorite Simpsons characters in this early open world title.
What Is It? The Simpsons: Hit & Run is an open-area game where you control the four main members of the titular family (sorry, Maggie) and also Apu, for some reason. The game features seven levels which alternate between three large areas of Springfield. The game was released in 2003 and features many recognizable sights from the show in that era.
You will spend most of your time in a vehicle. These range from the family station wagon to Malibu Stacy’s convertible to Mr. Plow. Each has their own stats and the game does a fantastic job of making the stats matter which results in some strong distinction between them. You will receive a few vehicles automatically by way of making it to the next level, you will also be required to purchase certain vehicles along the way, and you can commandeer any car in the city, as you might in a GTA game.
Each of the game’s seven levels features seven main missions. You control one character per level, so you are Homer for the first level, then Bart on the next, etc… The 49 main missions are composed almost entirely of six or seven basic vehicle mission types: race, tail someone, lose someone tailing you, wreck a vehicle, ram into a vehicle to knock items from it, and race around picking up items before time runs out. The game mixes these basic types together on multi-part missions throughout the game to try to add some variety, but after 49 of these, they start to wear a bit thin.
Luckily, the game does feature a large amount of side content. Simply cruising through a level doing only the main quests might net you a 30% completion rate for that level, which tells you a lot about how many side quests and collectibles you can engage in if you’d like. These are also mostly a stock set of things, such as racing three kids to unlock a new car, finding hidden collectibles, and so on, but it is a significant chunk of extra content for those who want to engage.
The Hit & Run aspect of the game is a system where doing damage will increase a meter in the corner of the screen. If the meter fills, you enter Hit & Run mode which has police swarming towards you. If they successfully stop your vehicle, you are fined 50 coins and immediately resume as if nothing happened. This is mostly a nothing feature, but getting swarmed is annoying enough that it could cause you to lose a race or other timed mission so you will have to pay attention to your meter to avoid that, especially later in the game.
One reason the driving mission tropes wear a bit thin is that the game rarely leverages the on-foot aspect as far as main missions go. You can exit your vehicle and run around at any point in this game, but it is rarely beneficial to do so unless you need to collect coins to afford a new outfit or vehicle or you want to find some of those hidden extras. The 3D platforming here is nothing noteworthy, but it is certainly good enough to be included in more of the main missions than they were.
The whole game can be finished in about ten hours, but you can easily double that if you want to dive into all of the side content.
Throughout the game, you will encounter Simpsons characters of the era. The visuals are good and do as good of a job as you could hope in taking a 2D art style into 3D. The town itself is the star of the show, as fans of the show will certainly get a kick out of seeing various sites they recognize around every turn. The voice acting is strong, the jokes are very Simpsons-y, etc… It is all wrapped up in a light story that would be fine as an episode from the show. It is what you would want and expect from a game like this.
The Best Part: The game does a great job with the vehicle controls given this is not, explicitly, a racing game. The difference between Bart’s spaceship on wheels and a monster truck is massive. Given the scope of the game, it would not have been the least bit surprising for the developers to phone this aspect in, but as it stands the variation among the vehicles, and the tight controls common to all, are a standout feature. This makes driving, what you’ll be doing for 90% of your time in the game, a fun experience.
The Worst Part: Many missions are multi-part, meaning you may need to tail somebody to a location then immediately enter a race against a different car, then maybe destroy a car for the final part. The game uses this to pad out the playtime and add variety and it is somewhat effective on those fronts. The annoying part here is that failing any part of a mission will send you back to the beginning. This makes the game a bit more frustrating than it needs to be. A core component of some of the races is finding shortcuts in the level, as there are many races you simply can’t win without them. This is good fun which rewards players getting familiar with the levels. The downside is that if you have to go through two or three other phases of a mission before you can try to find the necessary shortcut in a race portion, you end up spending a lot of time doing repetitive, less fun things. This is quite effective at padding the playtime, but also detrimental to the overall experience.
The Verdict: I was a Simpsons fan in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. I fell off probably two years before Hit & Run released, but I still recognized basically everything in this game. The only Simpsons video game I really liked before this was Road Rage and that is only because I love Crazy Taxi so a pure clone with a Simpsons skin was, of course, going to be a fun time. In theory, Hit & Run should be a layup for me.
In reality, I found the game to be just okay. The fun setting, characters, and good driving mechanics are held down by repetition and lack of variety. They did a great job with the driving aspect of this GTA clone, but left you with almost nothing to do on foot outside of searching for coins to afford the outfit or vehicle to need to have for the next mission. Despite the average platforming controls, it was always a fun time to explore on foot.
Hit & Run has a reputation as a PG-13 GTA and many people hold it in a very high regard for being a great game. In my experience, this is likely a “you had to be there” situation as the game holds up well enough today, it is simply a little too one-note. However, removed from any expectations, Hit & Run provides a good time over twenty years after its release, and that’s not an easy accomplishment.
How to Play: PlayStation 2*, GameCube, Xbox, PC
*console played on for this review
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