Midnight Club: Los Angeles - Review

Added November 6th, 2008 by Kenneth Rathburn

Acclaimed developer Rockstar is no stranger to changing things around.  From taking different approaches with their franchises or a new title (Table Tennis anyone?), it’s expected to see noticeable variations with their games.  In April, Rockstar took things in a more serious direction with Grand Theft Auto IV and was met with universal acclaim.  Now, we’re given Midnight Club: Los Angeles, the fourth title in their fairly popular racing series; arriving with a few alterations of its own.  Have these modifications brought it to the front of the pack or is it lagging behind the competition?

Midnight Club: Los Angeles places you in the shoes of a newcomer in town hoping to make a name for himself.  Upon arrival you’re given a choice between three cars from some locals who help you around the racing scene.  From there, you race events with a few enemies and allies gained along the way.  It’s pretty obvious the story is only meant to serve as a bare-bones reason for why you’re in Los Angeles and, as with every other racing game out there, it’s forgettable at best.

Unlike previous Midnight Club titles, which were set in multiple cities, Los Angeles takes place in, well, Los Angeles.  The scale of the entire city is definitely a good step above the locations from previous entries, though some might miss the excitement of venturing into new territory.  Fortunately, there are plenty of events to find and tackle around the city, with more being added after completing others.  This is nice since you won’t run out of things to do anytime soon.

There are a number of ways to access these proceedings throughout the game.  You can cruise until finding someone to race or pull up a map outline to choose where you want to go.  There’s also the option of viewing a map of the actual city by pressing the Back button (which zooms out from your location), allowing access to races from there.  Press the Y button and you’ll find the main objectives and can set a GPS marker for any of the available happenings.  It’s a neat addition and while key goals are provided, the choice of what events and when to tackle them is up to you.

Midnight Club’s signature checkpoint system is once again present in Los Angeles.  Ordered, unordered, circuit and Landmark races - selecting the best route to get to the finish line without checkpoints - still function the same as ever.  While the game does offer the occasional time trial and car delivery, you’ll mostly participate in the aforementioned races.  Flash your headlights at another driver and you’ll begin racing to the starting line.  Depending on the finishing position, you’ll acquire more reputation (which we’ll get to later).  As always, the checkpoint races work well and since you don’t need to be too close to clear them, it helps alleviate some of the nuisances from previous installments.

Races have one of four difficulties, represented by colors (green being easiest, red being hardest).  Beating these on higher difficulties will earn more money and reputation, with the latter determining your rank in the game and unlocking upgrades, cars and more races.  Money is fairly easy to obtain, but there are plenty of ranks to progress through and a plethora of cars and parts to purchase.  The game handles this play-and-reward system well and the desire to attain more items and cash can become unexpectedly addicting.  

Most events take course over three races with some requiring you to win a certain number of times.  The game also has point-based tournaments which you can generally choose the difficulty for in advance.  There are a few ways to compete in the game, but what it ultimately boils down to is clearing checkpoints as fast and efficiently as possible.

While the game does divide events into categories and difficulties, most gamers will only tackle the easier ones.  Midnight Club 3 fixed one of the biggest issues with its predecessor: excessive challenge.  Unfortunately, Midnight Club: Los Angeles has brought that exact problem back with a vengeance.  After the first race, the game becomes surprisingly tough and haphazardly goes from laughably easy to painstakingly harsh.  Even on the easiest settings, the game can be completely unforgiving, with one or two mistakes potentially costing you the race.

This can happen for any number of reasons.  Sometimes the AI becomes very aggressive and will leave you in the dust.  Traffic tends to be in the most awful areas at the worst instances and at times it’s easy to make a wrong turn towards a checkpoint.  It can quickly get frustrating.  The game demands patience since it might take a while to adapt to the way it controls.  The gameplay will click quicker with some more than others while a few may have to mess with the options to get a firm grip.  Once you get a good feel and can manage to beat some events it becomes fun and exciting.

One other annoyance in the game, however, is the cops.  Unlike Need for Speed, cop chases in Midnight Club are not enjoyable.  Cops have a very small role in the game and you’ll repeatedly encounter the same patrolling cruisers.  Attention can be avoided by travelling slowly when they’re around, but it seems odd for an arcade-style game to encourage safe driving.  Sadly, the chases are always uneventful and boring; gaining the cop’s attention is way too easy and losing them is simply annoying.  The evasion system feels broken at best; we had a point when there was only a roadblock and we were still in the chase despite being on the other side of the map.  

These frustrations can be alleviated by one of four available special abilities.  Zone temporarily slows down time, Agro makes your vehicle briefly indestructible and lets you ram any vehicles out of the way (including the racer AI), Roar forces any nearby traffic aside and EMP will shortly slow down nearby racers.  In order to use any of these you’ll have to drive cleanly for a certain amount of time.  One ability can be equipped per car and further use will allow more gauges for them.  Each of these capabilities is helpful, but EMP and Agro tend to be most practical since they can hinder the indecisive AI.

If a break from the single player experience is desired you can always hop on to Xbox Live for some multiplayer speeding.  There are plenty of ways to play the game online, but it’s ultimately standard races and capture the flag-style procedures.  Up to sixteen people can participate on Xbox Live as opposed to taking on roughly four opponents at a time offline.  One nice part about the online portion is that being among the first to finish will add money to what you’ve earned in the single player section.  Racing with friends is mostly satisfying although there’s a good chance you’ll encounter some performance bugs such as the environments going from blank to detailed and other gamers’ cars spawning all over the place before and during the race.  These issues can be persistent, but they don’t ruin the experience and it’s nothing a quick patch or two shouldn’t fix.

Outside of racing, modifying vehicles is also available.  While the list of roughly forty cars isn’t terribly impressive, the options to transform them are.  Body parts, paint, performance options and the like are all present.  You can also adjust several aspects of the interior, put multiple vinyls on with several shape and masking options, give your car two-tone paint jobs and much more.  If you love altering every part of your ride, it’s easy to become addicted with the potential for hour-long customizations to take place.  It’s all very impressive.

Naturally if there’s so much to do with the cars you’ll want them to be sharply rendered in-game.  Fortunately, the cars in Midnight Club: Los Angeles look great, with each having approximately 100,000 pixels.  The detail definitely shows.  The game’s damage modeling, while not on the level of say Grand Theft Auto, is pretty good.  The city itself usually looks great with the abovementioned bland to detailed texture setback being the only major issue.  And since the game has a full day and night cycle, you’ll be able to see it from multiple perspectives (five angles are available for every car, including a nifty cockpit view).

The cars also sound very good when driven, with noticeable changes being made after performance parts have been added.  Other sound effects such as crash noises are decent, though not awe inspiring.  The soundtrack is hit or miss depending on your taste in music.  There are plenty of licensed tracks in the game, with multiple for each genre.  While most gamers will be able to find some tunes they’ll like, not many of the songs seem to fit the fast style of the game.  And since the default audio settings make it tough to hear the songs over the occurring action, it makes the music feel like it’s contributing very little to the game.

Midnight Club: Los Angeles has the right concepts in place with plenty of realized potential, but much still untapped.  It’s a solid game that most arcade racing fans should find something to enjoy, but the uneven difficulty, lackluster soundtrack, car roster and a somewhat basic online portion are what hold it back from being a truly great racer.  Fans of previous games in the series and especially Midnight Club 2 will get the most out of it while others will simply shrug it away due to the flaws.