Midnight Club: Los Angeles review (PS3/X360)

As a franchise Midnight Club has failed to set cash machines alight like its rivals Need For Speed, Burnout and Project Gotham has. As Midnight Club is developed by the world-famous Rockstar North, it’s often puzzled me why this is the case.

Perhaps it’s because it’s treated like the bastard child of GTA, getting nowhere near the amount of PR or marketing put behind it that its bigger brother receives. Or perhaps it’s because that, in reality, it’s often been slightly behind its aforementioned rivals in terms of production values and gameplay. Whatever it is, something tells me it’s not going to change with this new release.

New kid on the block

Beginning as a stereotypical newcomer to the scene, you purchase your first car (a choice of three heaps of junk) and participate in your first race to show people just how good you are, even in a dilapidated VW Golf. After winning your first race, a few more races open up and you slowly start to earn reputation points and money to soup up your ride. And when I say slowly, I do mean, s-l-o-w-l-y.

The rewards in Midnight Club: LA are not given out lightly. Every reputation point and every bit of cash you win has been earned. Winning races is not easy and when you consider that you have to win a lot to even be able to consider upgrading your car or trading it in for another one, you’ll be spending a lot of time in whatever ride you currently have. Instead of being a bad thing, this is actually a very good thing. It gives the player time to appreciate the car they have and learn how best to drive it, and when you do manage to upgrade it or trade it in, you appreciate it even more.

From the very start, winning races is no easy feat. That’s not down to decent AI, in fact the AI is abysmal most of the time and often doesn’t react to your presence, but more down to the worst use (or best, depending on your opinion) of rubber-band AI I have encountered since Need For Speed: Underground. For example, on my second race I drove a fairly flawless race and only lost control right at the very end, hitting an oncoming car which cost me three or four valuable seconds, enough for my opponent to overtake me just on the finishing line. Choosing to restart the race, I had a fairly abysmal drive and spent most of the race firmly behind my opponent, even at one point taking a wrong turning and having to turn around, only for my opponent to slow to a crawl on the last straight of the race and allow me to overtake him on the line. It’s like he’d been given team orders and didn’t make me feel as though I had earned that victory at all, which went completely against the reward structure.

The AI does get harder, much harder, but there are still times when you know that you’ve won the race because you drove badly at the start and caught up at the end, and where you’ve lost a race because you drove flawlessly until the end but clipped a car on the home straight. Rubber-band AI does have its fans, but I am most definitely not one of them.

LA: city of angels and pimped-up Nova’s

LA, as you would expect, is a very large city and populated with plenty of pedestrians and lots of licensed cars doing their best to hamper your progress and make it feel like a living and breathing city. As with Liberty City’s attempt at replicating New York, Midnight Club’s LA is quite realistic and diverse but, and this always bothers me with racers set in one or two cities, it’s all very samey. While it helps with familiarity, I yearn for more variety. It wouldn’t matter so much if you had to get used to breaking points and race lines, such as circuit racers, but familiarity just leads to knowing where the shortcuts are and not much else. Most corners in Midnight Club LA can be taken at full speed and very few require anything more than a quick dab of the handbrake. It’s arcade racing, but a bit too simplistic and repetitive.

Even on one of the very rare occasions that you take a corner too fast and smash into a wall, clip a lamppost or crash through a rubbish bin, very little actually slows your progress. You bounce off trees with barely more than a few mph lost, you rip other items clean out of the ground and can ride along most walls. Unless you hit the wall squarely or hit oncoming traffic, there’s very little that can stop you.

There is reward for driving cleanly though, as special abilities are charged up more quickly the less destruction you cause. Zone is particularly useful, giving you bullet-time for a few seconds, but the old favourite Roar is still, by far, my favourite. There’s something very pleasurable about scattering cars in every direction and hampering your competitors in the process.

As always, being able to develop the ability of keeping one eye on the road whilst having the other watching the map to see where the next checkpoint is, is an absolute necessity. It almost makes you want to be the guy from the Lynx adverts. Almost. The trouble is, you often ignore what’s on the road ahead of you and even learn to forget about your opponents and instead concentrate on the map so you know where to turn at the next junction before you get there in order to reach the next checkpoint. Each checkpoint has an arrow to let you know, roughly, where the next checkpoint is, but I found these too difficult to see clearly until I was almost upon the checkpoint and found using the map easier. The trouble with that is, it removes some of the excitement. It almost feels as though you’re not racing anybody else and instead participating in glorified time trials, such is the importance placed on going the right way over worrying about where your competitors are.

Midnight Club LA would have undoubtedly have benefited from having Race Driver: Grid’s ‘Flashback’ system. That would have enabled the player to drive without having to be so cautious about keeping an eye on the map, as they could have wound back time if they had taken the wrong turning. It would have also helped iron out some of the AI frailties, giving you a chance to undo your one and only mistake right near the finish line, which almost always results in you losing the race.

Is Midnight Club worth the membership?

Despite the above shortcomings and lack of progress with the series, Midnight Club: LA is still an enjoyable arcade racer. There are even a few elements that it does better than other racers. For instance the day and night cycle is very much appreciated, and ensures that you’re not stuck in some permanent neon lit city, like some nasty Need For Speed offshoot. There is also a healthy amount of licensed vehicles, ranging from sports cars to muscle trucks and even some bikes. Some of the vehicles in the same class are hard to tell apart in terms of handling and acceleration, but the choice is welcome.

The cops also add even more realism to the cities and add a bit more variety to the proceedings. If you pull over and allow yourself to be caught, you’re given a small fine and you can be on your way. If you choose to try and outrun them and succeed, you’re rewarded with a nice dollop of reputation points. If you fail and they catch you though, there’s a big penalty to pay. It’s a nice risk-reward system and it works really well.

It’s also a game full to the brim with content. There are plenty of races to choose from and you even get called upon to defend your record times on stretches of road, as your AI rivals will quite regularly knock half a second off of your attempt and invite you to beat the new time. Even though I’m not a fan of having to drive around the city to find my next opponent, or listening to the awful dialogue in the cut scenes (when exactly did it become a requirement for a racing game to have a story and a sandbox environment?), there’s always something to do nearby.

Online multiplayer is also done extremely well, although you will have to learn all of the shortcuts if you want to be able to compete and win more than a handful of races. It’s virtually lag free though and it can be extremely hectic, which makes for an excellent online racer to play with friends. Purely in terms of fun, I’m struggling to think of any online racer I’ve played recently that rival’s it.

The modifications system is also another area that Midnight Club LA excels in, and is one of the best seen in any racer to date. Suffice to say, if you’re the type of gamer that likes to pimp up their ride, there’s plenty of pimping to be done.

But for everything that Midnight Club LA does well, it nearly undoes it all by playing it all a little too safe and having one of the most punishing difficulty levels this side of 1984. Despite all the hours of content, the thumping soundtrack and the superb customisation system, it’s all a little…dull. Being beaten time and time again for making one small mistake near the end of a race isn’t a lot of fun and the racing is a little lifeless at times. It’s also not going to change the opinion of anybody who hasn’t enjoyed any of the previous games in the series.

Which leaves Midnight Club: LA in that awkward position of being a game I could recommend but with a healthy dollop of criticism. Unless you have a craving for a new racer, with Need For Speed Undercover just around the corner, I would also recommend waiting to see how that compares to Midnight Club LA before making a decision on which one to buy. If you do decide to pick it up you’re unlikely to be disappointed, but it’s also unlikely to set your gaming world on fire.