Midnight Club LA Remix review (PSP)

Build the revs, hover over the handbrake and get ready for the tire squeal, the streets of LA turn into a racing circuit in this latest portable street racing offering placed before us by the people at Rockstar. Midnight Club LA Remix is the little brother of Midnight Club Los Angeles on the home consoles, reworked and tweaked to work for the PSP.

From the start, when you pick up your first car (why does it always seem to end up being a golf GTI?) you jump straight into some racing. Launching into the storyline where, essentially, you are the new guy on the street, working your way through the list of street racers in LA, earning money and respect to upgrade your car and earn the right to race the elite of the street circuit. Take a leisurely drive round the neighborhood and you'll quickly find local races and drivers, who with merely the flash of your headlights, are happy to oblige you in a little car on car action. Wait for the countdown and folks, here is where the fun begins.

Which Way?

Racing in Midnight Club is pure unadulterated fun, flying through the streets has a brilliant feeling of speed, with buildings and traffic flicking past so quickly you'll hardly know they were there. Rather than pre-marked circuits, or closed off streets the city is open and alive with traffic trundling along whilst you attempt to weave through, avoiding buses and fire trucks, trying to claw your way to the front of the pack. The open city means that you have a large degree of freedom over the route you choose to get you from the start line to the finish, in fact one particular type of race has no track markings at all leaving it entirely down to you to find your route. In most cases there are bright glowing markers indicating which direction to go, with a GPS/Minimap in the corner providing a guiding arrow to keep you going in the right general direction.

The race markers are, admittedly, far from perfect. You will find times that a marker indicates you should be hanging a right, only to see the other racers fly straight on and over a bridge before turning, the fact that you are traveling so quick is also a factor here as some of the markers are right on, or slightly round a corner meaning you don't see them until you have passed the point you could make the required turn. It doesn't take to long before you grow accustomed to the marker placement and start to get a feel for when to expect one or where they are trying to tell you to go but the annoyance never completely goes away.

Custom Job

Customization is a big element to the Midnight Club, with the ability to upgrade your car and change the look. The range of options is impressive and provides the ability to create something that feels like it yours, and, with a decent range of cars available to you there is a car and look for every occasion. At the end of the day though it about the racing itself, and as already mentioned it feels good. All the cars have the ability to have nitrous installed, turning something that already feels very quick into an insane seat of your pants roller coaster ride. The AI racers do feel relatively railed, and don't really react to you, however you'll be focusing so much on keeping yourself on the road that you won't notice that too much.

Although the car handling is brilliantly done, each car class feeling different and requiring a slight alteration to you driving style, without any of them becoming so far removed that you feel completely lost behind the wheel, it's the special abilities of each class which will give you the edge against another similarly spec'd competitor. One of the finest examples is the Zone ability, which is also one of the first you'll come across. A few seconds of clean driving with give you the opportunity to activate this ability which slows time for a few seconds. This allows you to pitch the car into the perfect drift to get round a ninety degree bend without overshooting and slamming into the building on the far side. There is also the Slipstream Turbo, stick on the tail of the guy in front while the meter charges and you can get a temporary kick of acceleration to sling shot past them. There is great satisfaction to be gained from slipstreaming the leader and hitting the turbo at the last minute to get your nose over the line first.

Last Lap

Midnight Club LA Remix is not perfect, the early races are two easy while the harder races can come with a sudden harsh spike in difficulty, the race markers I've already mentioned and draw distances can seems a bit short when traveling at full throttle, but i can forgive it all of this just for the smile it can put on your face when it all comes together and you get lost in the race. Oh and did i mention that when you get bored of LA you get the opportunity to move on to Tokyo?