Developer: Rockstar San Diego
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Available on: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
Reviewed on: PlayStation 3

Before I get into reviewing Midnight Club: Los Angeles, I feel I should state my views on the racing genre: I’m not a big fan of it. That said, I have had some fun with a few racing titles, such as Gran Turismo 3, Need For Speed: Underground  and V8 Supercars. But the earliest racing game I can recall playing is Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge back on the Amiga. That game was released in 1990 and eighteen years later concept is still exactly the same: go around in circles really fast. The genre has evolved about as much as a Vogon and yet has an unhealthy tendency to produce endless sequels. We’re up to seven Burnout games, Gran Turismo 5 is on the horizon (ignoring all the Prologue and Concept spin-offs) and at the time of writing there are fifteen Need For Speed games. Midnight Club: Los Angeles is the fourth game in the series, not counting the “remix” edition of Midnight Club 3. Given the ad finitum nature of the genre I haven’t been excited about a racing game since Burnout 3 when I discovered what a stroke of genius it was to break up the tedium of going around in circles really fast with the ability to smash opponents and enjoy it in slow motion in all its beautiful destruction.

Midnight Club: Los Angeles doesn’t have the glorious vehicle devastation of Burnout – but was I pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying it. Set entirely in the city of Los Angeles, you play a generic looking guy come to town hopping from race to race, looking to prove himself in the street racing scene. Thankfully, this meagre story is a small aspect of the game and there are only a handful of cutscenes. What the game is really about is giving you a huge city absolutely filled with missions, modes and things to do – even if all of them revolve around cars driving fast.

Midnight Club has a free roaming structure where you can drive around Los Angeles and enter races and challenges as it suits you – not unlike Need For Speed: Underground, but better. The city is of a decent size – but not so massive that it takes forever to get from one race to the next. Plus there are challenges absolutely everywhere. Not only do you have mission specific races but there are plenty of drivers and locations out there offering additional races. What’s really great about this structure is that you never feel as though you’re being forced to do certain races. Sure, there are certain missions you need to do in order to progress, but there are so many additional races all over the city you can play the game however you want.

Races come in several forms including racing from point to point, lap races, racing to a certain landmark, time trials, series races and more. They’re all essentially the same, but they do have their own unique aspects. Landmark races lets you race to the destination any way you want, whereas most other races use checkpoint flares to mark the route. It’s a simple and effective system: toxic looking browny-green flares guide you from point to point, green flares mark the point where the next lap starts and a red flare marks the end of the race. It keeps the city completely open whilst clearly making the race path easy to follow. However, the arrows that glow within the flares are not so clear to read, which can sometimes make sharp turns tricky to spot. Still, all it takes is a quick glance at your map to see where the race is headed and you won’t get caught off guard by an unexpected corner.

All the races are pretty much the same: go from here to there faster than anyone else. But it’s good to see there seem to be far more point-to-point type races than lap races, which are more intense and less repetitive than the driving around in circle variety of race. Then there are the car delivery missions, which offer something a bit different. In these you have to get a new car to its owner within a time limit and without damaging it too much. It’s still go-fast gameplay, but having to minimise damage adds a much appreciated second layer to the mission. The problem with Midnight Club: Los Angeles (and most racing games) is that there isn’t much to them: your sole goal is to drive faster than anyone else. I’d argue that Driver on the original PlayStation remains one the greatest driving games around because it offered both variety and danger in its gameplay. Most often you’d find yourself driving from point to point, but there’d be police to escape and avoid along the way. But then there were missions which shook things up, such as where you’d have to drive dangerously to intimidate a hostage passenger or delivering a car without damaging it or its contents. The point was that there was never just one thing happening in Driver – there were elements of speed, risk, danger and time that made the game exciting. Though Midnight Club is mostly a one layer game, it’s good to see that Rockstar seems to have taken a few pointers from Driver. Not only are the car delivery missions familiar, but in Midnight Club you’ll also have to deal with the police of Los Angeles. Though not a major factor, having the police start pursuing you mid-race is wickedly exciting. Most of the time, the police are just something you have to be aware of as you’re cruising through the city. Should they catch you speeding or breaking the law they’ll immediately pursue you – and the police are vicious. You shouldn’t even bother trying to speed away until you get your paws on a better car. So if you know you can’t easily outrun the police in your vehicle – or you just don’t feel like having a chase, you can just over and pay a fine. Or you could pull over, wait until the police officer has exited the vehicle and then speed off, giving you a slight head start in a chase.

But my favourite Driver influence would have to be how it’s impossible to run over pedestrians. On the other end of the scale of awesome, Midnight Club has a damage model that’s about advanced as Driver’s. Burnout this is not and totalling your car will result in no more than some dents, scratches and maybe a broken window. Still, Midnight Club does have an interesting damage system. While by no means encouraged, it’s possible to drive with a Burnout level of recklessness and take rival cars down. There’s a health bar nestled next to your speedometer and totalling your car will result in you failing the race – it’s a great way of adding extra risk as you drive through the traffic of Los Angeles. Thankfully, the damage system is quite lenient. While using your car as a battering ram on opponents your vehicle can sustain quite a bit of damage. Plus the clipping objects is very forgiving, with most blows glancing off to the side. You car will only stop dead if you hit something directly head on. It works really well – the damage system is present enough to make you consider how reckless you drive, but lenient enough not to cost you the race should you clip a car after driving through a red light.

That same balance is struck nicely in the way the cars handle. The controls are loose enough to do things you couldn’t in a real car, but driving still feels believable and each car is noticeably different in the way it feels to drive. You start the game with a low-end car, but as you progress the quality of cars you have access to increases. You gain cars by winning certain races, buying them or putting your own vehicle on the line and racing for pink slips. Thankfully, if you loose you can always race again to win your car back. There are also motorcycles in the game. While they give you better speed for a lower price, it’s also far easier to have an accident that will cost you your lead. As is the standard of street racing games, your cars all customisable inside and out. Your race money can go towards improving the parts of your vehicle and the effects of new parts are clearly displayed by a simple graph showing your cars speed, handling and acceleration. This simplicity is very much welcome for non-car enthusiasts like myself. You can also customise the look of cars with different parts. Best of all the ability to customise details such as the colour of car parts, tyres dimensions, ride height and more are endlessly tweakable after single payment of $1000 of your prize money. It’s a small thing, but being given access to customise so much for a one time payment is appreciated.

The biggest appeal of a street racing game is competing not just against other drivers, but also having to dodge and work around the flow of traffic. It becomes not so much about sticking to a racing line so much as how well you can manoeuvre. The downside of street racing game is that cities can be pretty dull places to look at. You won’t find the graphical variety of Gran Turismo here and you’ll often drive through the same landmarks and streets so that one race can feel very much like another. Still, it is actually a pretty good looking game with one of the best renderings of rain I’ve come across. The way water pools in the dips and cracks in the road is a great attention to detail. Unfortunately, this massive city comes at a cost as it appears that Rockstar weren’t able to figure out a way to render multiple versions of the city and so there is no split screen multiplayer. You can race other people online – but you can’t sit down with some friends in the same room and race together on the same console. This sucks, especially considering that I cannot think of a single racing game on the last generation of consoles that did not have split screen multiplayer. Dropping this mode just feels like a step backwards. Though to be fair, Midnight Club: Los Angeles isn’t the only game to drop split-screen multiplayer – Burnout 5 springs to mind.

But despite the gaping hole where split screen multiplayer should be, Midnight Club does have a lot of other features going for it. You can access all of the game modes by just hitting pause whilst cruising around the city – going online, going into an arcade race, making a custom race track and more is all incredibly accessible. How well everything is perfectly integrated is best exemplified by the race editor. To create your own custom track you can either go into the map view and plot your check points – or just drive around the city and drop checkpoints as you go. Simple and awesome.

Yet the best feature of this game is purely accidental. The game has a few bugs in it, so while having the game freeze up wasn’t cool, there was an audio glitch that was unexpectedly incredible. What happened was that I started a race and nearly all of the sound mix was gone; all but the ambient noises and the sound of cars rushing past. There were no engine noises, tyre screeches or any of the sounds the usually predominate the soundscape. Instead there was this Zen-like atmosphere of a quiet city, punctuated by the whoosh of cars zipping by. This happened twice – and both times were brilliantly immersive, creating this zoned-out mindset of racing. Though a bug, I’d love to see more games experimenting with this idea of subdued sound designs.

If only the rest of the audio design was as awesome. The music is mostly an assortment of generic rock, rap and dance that didn’t appeal to my tastes – though there were some interesting songs, such as Partie Traumatic by Black Kids. But after losing several races due to crashing while changing tracks trying to find a half decent song, I mostly kept the radio switched off. That said, you do have the ability to create a custom playlist in the game. Then there’s the dialogue that occurs both at the start of races and throughout the race. While it’s great that Rockstar went to the effort to make it feel as though you’re racing people and not just cars, it just gets repetitive. Not because there’s a lack of lines of dialogue, but because the lines all boil down to variations of: “I’m going to win” and “oh no, you’re not.”

Not that it doesn’t suit the characters, as everyone in this city seems to be ego driven douche bags. Rockstar seem to have this fascination with the illegal street culture of America – evidenced most strongly in their Grand Theft Auto games. Here Midnight Club revolves around an illegal street racing scene populated by macho archetypes looking for something to prove and it just gets tiring meeting the same kind of people in this game. It gets very hard to take people seriously when everyone claims to be the best racer. Not to mention that the product placement is far too plentiful and obvious. Hell, there’s even product placement to be found in the Trophies and Achievements. With Need For Speed being extremely similar in tone, I would have loved to see Rockstar explore race cultures other than this one. Enjoyable as the driving in Midnight Club is, I still yearned to be doing something different, like driving tuk tuks through narrow streets or racing up to the shops to get milk – just something and anything that I hadn’t seen in a dozen other racing games before.

While the world of Midnight Club might be generic, they have thrown in a few notable elements. Driving behind cars doesn’t just give you a slip stream boost, but inexplicably tops up your nitrous and allows you to trigger a bonus boost. You also have the ability to defy physics and shift the weight of your vehicle. On a motorbike this helps with cornering, but in a car going up on two wheels stops people from using your own slip stream. Lastly, you can equip your cars with special ability, such as the ability to blast sound waves that clear a path or slow down time. The catch here is that you charge up these abilities by driving cleanly. All of these are completely ridiculous and unrealistic, but they actually work – especially the power ups, which reward good driving with an advantageous bonus that, if used at the right moment, will help you win the race.

Midnight Club: Los Angeles really does give you a full package. Despite the absence of split-screen multiplayer, it does give you pretty much everything else you could want: online play, customisable cars, a race editor, a mountain of races and challenges, several other useless but fun features (such as the ability to take photos or how you can submit your car online to be rated by other players) and it’s all compiled into a very accessible and polished game. And yet, the cynic in me says that if you’ve purchased a racing game in the last ten years you probably don’t need to pick up Midnight Club: Los Angeles or any other racing game for that matter. Shiny and enjoyable Midnight Club may be, but the racing genre needs to do something spectacular to justify the necessity of its endless sequels. Personally, I’m still holding out for a racing game that starts in a town overrun by zombies, forcing you to speed through hordes of the hungry undead. Looking in the rear vision mirror you can see other cars crashing and getting overrun by zombies. Escaping the town, you drive through a thick forest, crashing through the thick foliage and zombified wildlife without regard. Then a nuclear bomb is dropped on the town and the last leg of the race see you racing from a rapidly expanding wall of fire, which you finally escape by driving off a cliff and plunging into the river below. Also the final level is set on the rings of Saturn. That game would rock, but in the meantime Midnight Club: Los Angeles is pretty good too.