GameCyte

I am not a member of the Midnight Club. I have never participated in an illegal street race, nor have I played any of Rockstar Games' Midnight Club series which focus on street racing. Hell, I've never even seen The Fast and the Furious; apart from some foolish moving violations earned in my youth, I am a total greenhorn when it comes to street racing. Unfortunately, the denizens of Midnight Club: Los Angeles seem to have realized this, and what's worse, they seem to have taken it personally. Midnight Club: Los Angeles is a game which is extremely unkind to beginners, with a steep learning curve and a great deal of lengthy repetition in store for a below-average racer. It's really a shame, too, because there are so many things that this game does extraordinarily well. I can't recall the last time when I so desperately wished I were better at a game.

Midnight Club is a series whose entries have always followed the standard racing-game routine: Start out with a pretty lousy car, win a few amateur races to earn enough cash to afford a better car, use that car to win harder races for more cash for better cars, repeat final step ad infinitum. Of course, being Rockstar titles, there's quite a bit of criminal glorification to drive the story and add personality to the experience. Midnight Club: Los Angeles is no different: Arriving in LA as a cocky East Coast racer looking to explore a new racing scene, all anybody will loan you is an old beater, but from there, you build both cash and reputation to open up new options.

The story is shallow, but this isn't really a negative factor. Games like Midnight Club aren't exactly epic tales of character growth and deep emotional struggles; the story is there in order to give you an excuse to tear ass around LA in fast, expensive cars. The story basically has you meet an NPC, listen to them suggest that you are not a fast driver, prove to them that the opposite is true, and then listen to the NPC declare that you may be good, but you'll never beat the next NPC on the list. Still, for what they're worth, Rockstar has taken the time to give the various characters in the game their own unique flavors -- each has their own collection of trash-talk lines they will deliver during the races, pre- and post-race taunts/congratulations, and so on. Some of these are even funny -- hearing your character ask an NPC named Julian, "So when did you finally add that 'N' to your name?" is worth at least a minor chuckle.

Navigating the game world is a free-roaming affair, which tends to be one of Rockstar's strong suits. Midnight Club: Los Angeles, it must be said, handles this element better than any racing game I've ever seen, and even better than some sandbox games which pride themselves on their game worlds. The interface for exploring the digitized Los Angeles is utterly spectacular: Naturally, there are the typical mini-map and compass features, but the first time you hit the "map" button, your jaw will hit the floor. The camera swings back for an overhead view of your car, and zooms up into the sky, displaying the entire map of LA in a 3D, real-time view. It's an impressive feat, for one, allowing you to navigate the map in a style reminiscent of Google Earth, checking out your routes as they will appear in-game; even when you resume gameplay, the camera then swings back to where your car is in the 3D model, letting you get your bearings very effectively. Keeping the player constantly in the same 3D game environment does wonders to provide a seamless experience, unlike most game maps which make you feel a slight disconnect from your game when activated.

The representation of Los Angeles, too, is extremely faithful, save for the traffic. If you've ever driven through -- or, more accurately, attempted to drive through -- Los Angeles, you will find yourself in disbelief over the lack of congestion downtown, on the 101, and so on. Of course, this isn't something one should hold against the game; sitting in stop-and-go traffic for 90 minutes does not make for a terribly fun racer. The environments, though, are utterly spot-on. I am by no means an LA expert, but the parts I am familiar with were instantly recognizable as I drove through them, including the downtown convention center, the Ventura Freeway, and more. So recognizable were these streets and landmarks, that when I reached the beaches of Santa Monica and entered the Pacific Coast Highway, I was immediately tempted to proceed North and visit my family in the Palisades (only to find that the map tragically ends there, re-routing you back the other way).

Of course, as fantastic as the environments are, one doesn't typically spend much time admiring it in a racing game; one expects the backdrop to be flying past them in a 150mph blur. The actual races in Midnight Club: Los Angeles will take you through every corner of the city, from the crowded downtown streets to the narrow, winding residential roads; from the death-defying highways to the abandoned railyards and river canals. It is here, during the actual races, that the "open world" freedoms actually start to falter. Burnout Paradise, another excellent entry in the open-world racing genre, provides total freedom of choice during its races -- you are given a start and a finish, and whatever falls in between is up to you. This is not the case in Midnight Club: Los Angeles: On occasion, the player is still allowed to forge his own path to objectives or race locations, but during the actual races, the routes are a pre-defined affair, marked with checkpoints that the player must pass through in order to win. Yet, as strange as it sounds, these constraints actually serve to make the races better.

Burnout Paradise is a terrific game in its own right, but if you don't know the city forwards and backwards, competing in an actual race is a disjointed and non-immersive affair due to the free-roaming aspects of the gameplay. When racing along an undefined route in an unfamiliar environment, finding your own path means you have to find your own path. In other words, one is frequently required to pause the game and check the map, bringing the action to a screeching halt while checking the current route and planning one's next turn or fork in the road. In Midnight Club, by comparison, the route is always made plain, allowing one to race from start to finish without pausing, and keeps the player from getting lost thanks to the game's exceptional visual cues.

The checkpoints themselves are handled magnificently -- each required point on the route is represented, in the game world, by a road flare, glowing brightly and sending a massive column of smoke several stories into the air, allowing players to keep track of their next destination at a glance. Furthermore, as you approach each checkpoint, a bright white arrow points towards the next one, giving you plenty of advance warning if you're going to need to make a sharp turn. It also needs to be said that the checkpoints, mechanically, are handled excellently; never will a race turn to frustration because the game decided you didn't pass through one checkpoint. The race designers have provided an extremely forgiving system for "passing" checkpoints, which actually do allow for plenty of shortcuts, cut corners, and improvisation. In over 100 races, I was only penalized for missing a checkpoint once -- and that was when I circumnavigated it by more than an entire city block.

Let's face it, after all -- open worlds are a great place to explore and play around in, between races, but when you're racing the clock, there's almost always just one ideal route to follow, and following the checkpoints just lets you stay on it. In addition, they allow for more creative races, onces including hairpin turns, multiple laps through the city, and required locations off the beaten path.

If you're ever dissatisfied with the game's races, of course, you're more than welcome to create your own. As with any open-world title, you can spend as long as you like simply cruising through the game world, putting off the missions for as long as you please. Or, at the press of a button, you can simply design your own race with the game's "race editor." Calling up this mode allows you to place a starting line at your location on the map, and drive through the city, placing as many or as few subsequent checkpoints as you wish, finally ending with a finish line at your final location. If you are so inclined, you can simply place the start at one end of the city, and leave the finish at the other, providing the open-world race of your dreams.

With a spectacular interface, excellent race design, some additional features such as special race powers, race types such as police chases and damage-infliction, and a massive array of cars and customization options, how is it possible to find flaw with Midnight Club: Los Angeles? The game's downfall is its accessibility: The title provides you with plenty of things you can do, but never really explains how to do any of them.

I'm willing to accept that a great deal of the difficulty I experienced with Midnight Club: Los Angeles may have been my own fault. As mentioned, I had never played a Midnight Club game before; perhaps someone who's been with the series a while might be able to leap right in. Perhaps my habits have been spoiled by spending too much time with the Burnout series -- a string of games which emphasize recklessness, destruction, and whipping around curves at 210mph. Midnight Club, by comparison, falls more on the side of realism; while certainly nowhere near the unforgiving simulation of a Gran Turismo, in Midnight Club, crashing into another car can knock you right out of the race, and taking a turn at 200mph is going to send you sliding half a block past your intended street and into a wall.

I'll readily admit it: I'm not a fantastic driver, and realistic racing games aren't my forte. On the other hand, Midnight Club: Los Angeles does very little to alleviate this problem. The game hands you a car, explains the game's basic drafting-for-a-turbo-boost mechanic, and sets you loose. Even in the initial few races, where a more forgiving AI and shorter routes allowed me to win a few times, I would find myself overturning, underturning, and generally skidding into cars and buildings at every corner, while my opponents seemed able to turn on dimes and make 90-degree corners without seeming to slow down. Again, I'm sure an experienced racer or a Midnight Club expert would already know how to handle these things, but I am neither of those things. Furthermore, I'm fairly sure I am not alone in my amateur status. A tutorial on cornering, a guide to car tuning, maybe even some wide-open practice space -- any of these beginner-friendly options would have been deeply appreciated.

One other flaw worth mentioning: While the majority of the gameplay is handled admirably, providing a real sense of speed and a good level of control over the cars, there are times when the physics tend to get rather flighty, leading to some race-halting moments and serious frustration. I know the cars are meant to be driven at very high speeds, but the difficulty in trying to get back up to speed after a crash or over-turn seems unnecessarily harsh -- spinning your wheels in futility while the rest of the pack overtakes you is never much fun. What's more annoying, though, are the seemingly inconsistent crash conditions, most notably those having to do with obstacles such as street lights and palm trees. Four times out of five, clipping a pole will only penalize you slightly, delivering a "glancing blow" to your car, costing you only a little speed and giving you some minor damage -- even if you appear to have slammed said pole directly into the center of your hood. However, every once in a while, hitting such a pole causes a dead stop, lodging your vehicle firmly against the immovable object until you back up several feet and go around it -- even if you're sure you just barely nicked the pole with your headlight. The solution to each of these problems, of course, is not to get stopped or run into obstacles, if you're able to manage it.

Unfortunately, Midnight Club: Los Angeles seems to expect its players to be rather skilled, and as such, it unknowingly sets up quite a few situations where lesser players are in for a frustrating time. Running a race in the game involves a little bit of rubberbanding, but the AI drivers tend to handle themselves in a realistic manner: If you take a particularly nasty crash, you can expect the other racers to get quite a lead, and if this happens during the last 25% or so of a race, you can more or less give up on catching them again. Thankfully, Midnight Club dodges the Burnout Paradise bullet of having you manually drive back to the start of a failed event; you can restart an event immediately from the pause menu.

However, an event in Midnight Club: Los Angeles is very rarely only one race. An overwhelming number of the game's events -- including story-critical missions -- are race "series," which require you to win several races in order to pass. These start out simply enough, but when the series start getting to the "first racer to 3 wins" difficulty, and the races start lasting 5-6 minutes at a time, this means you can be one race from victory, only to have just a couple of bad crashes, lose the next couple of races, and be forced to start the series from scratch -- spending upwards of half an hour of gameplay with nothing to show for it. The game isn't entirely merciless -- even a last-place finish is worth a tiny amount of reputation and cash, in most cases, so if you were inclined, you could still inch your way to a better car while consistently losing. However, given the expense of a new car, and the large barriers one needs to overcome with reputation, this will take you a very, very long time.

Midnight Club: Los Angeles is a hugely impressive game, with more personality than it needs, incredible graphics, a great soundtrack, some incredible speed-based experiences, and one hell of a lot of gameplay options, creative choices, and cars. If you're looking for a tough, no-holds-barred racer, Rockstar has a really fantastic game for you. I really wish I was the kind of person who was looking for such a thing, because this is a game I think I would hugely enjoy if I were any good at it. Unfortunately, I can't recommend it to everybody -- Rockstar seems to have designed the game on the assumption that you're usually going to be winning. And if you're not, there's going to be some road rage.

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