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Rockstar Games has made a name for itself by giving us the chance to indulge a healthy amount of our less than commendable fantasies by providing supremely crafted and highly detailed game worlds to explore and immerse ourselves in for untold hours at a time. Midnight Club: Los Angeles is no exception. Unfortunately, this high-octane racer hits the skids on such a regular basis, that you’ll be wishing Rockstar San Diego kept it in the shop just a bit longer before letting it hit the streets.

Welcome to L.A.

Unlike the massive narratives found in its Grand Theft Auto franchise, Rockstar keeps things simple with Midnight Club: Los Angeles. As the new guy in town, you start out the game just as the new guy would: no money, lame cars, and zero respect. You’re introduced to a couple of local racers, who turn you on to events and challenges around town. From there, it’s really a rags to riches tale. You’ll earn money and experience points with every race, regardless of where you place, that you then use to unlock new vehicles and buy upgrades.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t stay focused enough to really engross you, and most of the writing is pretty flat. While you meet a bunch of characters, none of them have the lasting impact as even the most minor character from a GTA game. This is really a shame, because wrapping a really good story around the game’s breathtaking map could have made this standard open-world racer into something truly original.

Like GTA IV, you find out about events via your cell phone, which in this case is a T-Mobile Sidekick. When you get a call in the game, the phone pops up on the bottom of the screen. From there, you can jump to the GPS map view of the city to find out exactly where to find the next mission. There is a ton of stuff to do in this game, and it’s all handled seamlessly thanks to the intuitive HUD and GPS map.

When you bring up the map, you zoom out to a Google Maps-style layout of the city. Here you can see your current missions, each of which corresponds with a location or a specific driver that you have to chase down to initiate their particular event or challenge. When you’re done with the map, the camera zooms into the map and lands just above your head. This very slick transition maintains the sense of immersion and also feels totally natural within the context of the game.

City of Reckless Angeles

By far the biggest draw for many people is the game’s scaled-down recreation of its titular city. There are so many places to visit and sites to see that people who have never been to LA will feel as though they have after playing this game. While it’s not perfectly accurate, it remains convincing thanks in large part to an incredible amount of real-world buildings, sites and areas. And for anyone who lives in LA or knows it well, driving around the city is all the more enjoyable, since you will instantly recognize street corners, intersections, office buildings (See if you can find G4’s building. It’s in there.) and even your apartment if you happen to live within the map’s geographical boundaries.

Now, people will immediately want to compare this map with the one from True Crime: Streets of LA, but since I don’t have the space here, I won’t really get into it. Just know that MC’s LA is by far the most detailed and most impressive representation of the city in a game. Period.

The Expense Reasons to Avoid Public Transportation

All of the licensed vehicles in the game are gorgeously rendered and handle as believably as you would expect for the MC franchise. Tuners, exotics, luxury cars and motorcycles all feel appropriately different and have realistic weight to them. While the controls are exaggerated for stylistic reasons, and you will wonder how a car that power-slides so much could also make impossibly tight 90-degree turns, they never feel out of place.

Because a lot of the game is spent crashing into things, motorcycles end up being more of a novelty than a reliable vehicle choice. Despite their superior speed, acceleration and handling, you will be knocked off far too much to ever really feel confident using them in races on a regular basis.

The vehicles can also be customize in an infinite number of ways thank to parts, paint and decals. Some people will spend hours just on this feature alone, and that’s totally understandable. There are a ton of options, and having the ability to auction off your creations online adds an extra element to the whole customizing process.

Ready. Set. Race…and Race…and Race.

Like I said before, you will not want for ways to put your fully customizable ride to work. In addition to time trials, series races and tournaments, there are also streetlight-to-streetlight races, highway races and delivery and vendetta missions, in which you must bring vehicular destruction to a series of unlucky drivers. Wager and pink slip races make things really interesting by virtue of the fact that you stand to not only lose your money but your car as well. This can add quite a bit of tension to already white-knuckle races.

There are also over 100 non-mission based challenges in the Arcade and Goal modes. Arcade races let you pick the course, the traffic pattern, time of day, weather conditions, number of AI cars for a quick one-off race. Goal races have certain requirements that must be met during them, like beating a specific time, escaping with a certain amount of damage and finishing first. While there is certainly plenty of racing to be had in the story mode, racing junkies will appreciate the added challenges.

There is also a race editor, which lets you create your own courses using the whole city as your backdrop. The editor is easy to use and very satisfying, and being able to play your tracks online adds tons of replayability.

Multiplayer is handled seamlessly as well. Like in GTA IV, you’re dropped into the map along with everyone else, and you then use your cell phone to initiate races. I came across a few lag issues during my play through, but they weren’t enough to interfere with the races. We’ll get to AI issues in a second, but let me just say that it’s always more enjoyable to race against other people than computer opponents, and nowhere is this truer than in MC:LA.

Drive. Crash. Drive. Crash. Yell.

In short, prepare to hit everything. Passenger cars, lampposts, trees, buildings, railings, and so on. I realize these are meant to be obstacles, but because of the slippery controls, it feels as though your car has an obstacle-magnet attached to its bumper. No matter how sparsely populated a street may be, you will invariably end up hitting the one thing on it, whether it be a lone passenger car or tree.

But it gets worse. Many of these objects are destructible, including mailboxes, bus-stop benches and lampposts. But every so often, mostly at the worst possible time, you will run into one that won’t budge. The most common scenario involves you cutting a corner in a close race, expecting that the lamppost will either slide off your car or snap like it does 99 percent of the time. Only this time, you manage to find the one indestructible post in the entire city, bringing your car to a dead stop and more often than not losing you the race. (It’s even more enjoyable when it’s the last in a series of five races that has taken you a half hour to play and which you then have to play all over again.) 

Artificial Super Intelligence

Don’t expect the computer racers to make things less infuriating. While it’s easy to get over yourself crashing (because after all, you are racing at breakneck speeds through an overcrowded metropolis and in the end, you are the one who crashed), it’s not nearly as easy to get over it when you see how little it happens to the computer. Even when the computer does get into the occasional fender bender, it barely slows them down. When you crash, it usually takes a few seconds to reorient yourself and get back up to speed. When, and if, the computer crashes, it’s back on track and out of sight before you even notice there was a crash. And forget about multicar crashes. You will invariable end up being the only one who gets stuck, even if four or five computer racers are involved.

In addition to severe rubber-banding issues, the computer AI also shares none of the practical concerns that you must deal with on a constant basis, namely speed and control. Weaving in between traffic is always a gamble, and yet the computer comes out clean almost 100 percent of the time. They zip around without a care in the world, while you understandably struggle to maintain control as you whip down streets at 180 mph. And when you add all of these factors to the game’s series races, you get a perfect storm of pain.

In these series races, you either have to be the first to win two or three races, or win the most out of as many as five races to complete the mission. This wouldn’t even be an issue if it wasn’t for the fact that you will find yourself losing the majority of races right at the end. You’ll battle for six hard-fought minutes only to collide with an NPC, who wanted to take a right turn instead of going straight like you anticipated, just two checkpoints from the finish line. There is simply no limit to the ways in which you will lose races in the closing moments. It’s truly remarkable.

 What’s worse is that all of these problems hurt even more because the racing can be incredibly satisfying and a hell of a lot of fun when it’s not gouge-your-eyes-out-with-the-thumb sticks frustrating. Ultimately, the game just doesn’t do enough to reward you for driving well. In spite of your best efforts, you will stare aghast as seemingly insurmountable leads vanish because of a few less than perfect turns or some ridiculous crash like those mentioned already.

The game does offer several special abilities to counteract the computer’s impeccable driving, but these abilities often hurt as much as they help. In addition to being able to slow down time to make precision turns, you can also blast other cars with either an EMP or a sound wave, and you can also become invincible for a short period of time. The EMP is good for slowing down other cars, but there is always the chance that it will short out your car too. The sound wave (Roar) is by far the funniest, since it sends out a shockwave that will literally cause every vehicle, including buses, hundreds of feet away to swerve off the road, yet the computer racers right next to you rarely so much as shutter (Although, it can blast guys off their motorcycles, which is pretty rad). The computer can’t use these powers against you, but given how perfectly they race, they hardly have a need for them.

The Fast and the Infuriating

Looking back, a good portion of this review has been negative, and that’s really a shame, because the game has all of the elements of a fantastic, standout gaming experience. The map is absolutely stellar, it looks amazing, the sound is top notch, there are enough missions to last you a very long time, the racing can be blistering and fierce when it wants to be, and multiplayer is a blast. However, thanks to the numerous computer-related balancing issues and somewhat punishing controls, it can oftentimes be more annoying than fun. And if it’s not fun, what’s the point? In the end, Midnight Club: Los Angeles is worth a look, but you’ll definitely want to take it for a serious test drive before you take it home.

Article written by: Jake Gaskill