For those of you who are unfamiliar to the series the game is basically city planning at a micro level. You decide the layout of the roads, the power grid and water system. Once you have settled on the various residential, commercial and industrial zones people begin to populate it. SimCity 4 (which is required to play Rush Hour) made this experience a visual feast. You can watch as night follows day across your city and cars and people go about their business influenced by your city planning decisions.

What strikes you first about this expansion pack is the new difficulty settings. One complaint about the original was that for new players to the genre SimCity 4 was very hard to play, particularly when trying to get past the 5,000 population mark without going broke. There are now three settings with easy mode giving you more start up cash and a greater flow of tax revenue. The purist may take a dim view of this dumbing down of the economic model, however with it's greater amount of advisor prompts and warnings the easier level is targeted at the new players.

Once you are off and running there are also some other changes that become clear immediately. There is a bevy of new roading options. Rather than having to make the leap from road to highway there is now an intermediate step of an avenue. This cheaper option is a good one for projected congestion areas without having to carry the huge overhead of highway maintenance costs. There is also an option of a one way road that allows you to plan out a grand routing strategy in the more heavily congested areas of your city.

Highways have also received a considerable overhaul with the inclusion of ground level highways (as opposed to overhead ones) and another much asked for feature, the "T" intersection. Alternative transport systems have not been forgotten with the inclusion of a monorail option and an elevated rail system.

To round off all these transport solutions is a new grand central station building, a park and drive building and a ferry terminal and service. If all these options bleed the city coffers dry then you can now build a toll booth at strategic locations. To help control all these systems is a new reporting option where you can now click on a building and determine how people are getting to that particular site. This feature is helpful in understanding how best to layout your city's commercial and industrial areas.

An added feature is also the inclusion of a new signage and label tool where you can now name roads and highways that reflect your whims and desires. This is designed to make the city building experience more personal and something that was relatively easy to implement and should have been in the original.

One much advertised feature was the inclusion of a "U Drive" mode where you can now take control of vehicles in your city and either free drive or complete missions that result in rewards. Driving itself is a simplistic affair using the cursor keys, with left and right steering the vehicle and up and down doing the acceleration. Initially the concept of driving the very streets you planned and built has a lot of appeal however the control system takes a lot of fun out of this aspect of the game. The vehicles are hard to control with you often finding yourself driving up on the pavement, missing the corners or taking out lamp posts. To get a modicum of control you are forced to travel at a slow speed and this is frustrating as other road users zip past at fair clip. What is cool though is that if you do fail to obey the laws of the road at intersections (run a red light or fail to give way) you invariably have an accident. There is the crash, the crumple and if you really have a bad one the accompanying fire as well.

The mission system allows you to complete missions such as catch the robbers, follow a trail or go to specific points on the map. Completion results in various new buildings or vehicles being revealed. These include both cars, trucks, planes and ships. Plane flights can be fun however in a very politically correct move it is impossible to crash your plane into a building, rather they bump into them. All in all it's an interesting concept and a different slant to the game but the control system ultimately lets it down.

The game has also built more on the popularity of the Sims genre with more interaction now being possible with your selected townspeople. You can now decide what sort of vehicle they drive and there is now a menu option that allows you to hear what they are thinking. Be careful though, you may hear some stuff about your mayoral ability that is best not to know.

If you think your citizens are getting to comfortable with the usual list of disasters that you can inflict on them (tornadoes and volcanoes etc) Rush Hour introduces 2 new ones to keep them on their toes. There is the 'Autosaurus Wrecks' which is a dinosaur created out of car wrecks that you can move about the city creating mayhem. Then there is the return of the old favorite, the 'UFO' from previous games in the series. This "Independence Day" baddie even spawns smaller ships that reek havoc on the screaming inhabitants of your city.