Midnight Club: Los Angeles (PS3)

The return of the king of open-city racing
10/24/2008 4:57 PM | 1 Comments | Page 2 of 3

A car for all seasons

There's a weighty driving model at work here, which is a welcome change of pace from the Burnout style of making every vehicle a simple rocket. It's a real delight to feel the difference among cars, particularly cars from different classes. The two main classes are nimble tuner cars and brute-power muscle cars. There are also high-end exotic cars and motorcycles, for something completely different. The trucks from the previous Midnight Club are gone, but luxury automobiles seem to fill their role nicely, plowing through traffic with near impunity. Who'd have thought the most expensive cars would be the ones you could drive the sloppiest?

The customization is even more ambitious this time, rivaling what Microsoft has done with its Forza games. There's even a rating system that lets other players rate your car design, although this seems mostly an incentive to get people to register for Rockstar's Web site. The car upgrades are annoyingly vague, but they're an important money sink, along with buying new cars. For all the breadth of activities that earn money, it'll be a while before you feel like you have enough.

Any car can be fitted with one of the game's four special powers. The last game assigned powers to specific types of cars, but now you can equip any car with any single power, and each one has to be leveled up before you can store more than one shot. Hello, simple role-playing stylings! You can work some real magic with Agro (invulnerability), Zone (Bullet Time and super-traction), Roar (scatter traffic, which will often mess up the other drivers) and EMP (shut down nearby engines for a short time). If you thought the nitro boosts were helpful, wait until you see what a difference a full rack of EMP bursts will make on the home stretch.

L.A. Story

The game introduces a protagonist just in from the East Coast who sounds like Mark Wahlberg about to talk to a donkey, but the real star here is Los Angeles itself. It's not quite as evocative as Rockstar's love letter to New York in Grand Theft Auto IV's Liberty City. That's partly because you tend to tear through it at high speed and partly because of Los Angeles' inherent soullessness. Still, the Rockstar studio in San Diego has done an admirable job of capturing the look of driving west along Ventura during a sunset, navigating the roads snaking through the hills on the way to the Valley, or cruising the low-slung splashes of color along Sunset and seeing the iconic Hollywood sign hovering in the hills. They get the palm trees, the weird cheer along the Santa Monica coast, the wider streets in the Valley, the stars in the sidewalk outside Mann's Chinese Theater, and what a pain it is to get to a freeway from Hollywood.

For a racing game in which you never get out of the car, this Los Angeles is surprisingly alive. Some of the same tech that breathed life into Liberty City is in evidence here. There are pedestrians everywhere, dense clots of traffic and details galore. As you check your map, or start races, the camera swooshes around to clearly indicate the relationship of different places to each other. This Midnight Club believes in geography, because it's part of how you race. You know you're learning the city when you take an alternate route that takes you through a gas station where you can refill your nitro boosts. No area here feels like generic EveryCity, USA. There are even roving police cars that will try to pull you over if they see you speed or run a red light. Later in the game, they'll try to bust up races, and even after the race is over, you'll have to elude them. These touches make this Los Angeles feel more like an actual place than a mere race track. And this is one of those rare games where I welcome in-game advertising. Oh, thank heaven for 7-Eleven, Best Buy, Sears and Pizza Hut.