Midnight Club: Los Angeles

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DVDfever.co.uk – Midnight Club: Los Angeles Xbox 360 review Dom Robinson reviews

Midnight Club: Los Angeles for Microsoft Xbox 360
Distributed by
Take 2 Interactive

cover

  • Price: £44.99 (360 & PS3); £29.99 (PSP)
  • Players: 1 plus online (16)
  • Widescreen: Yes
  • 60Hz: Yes (optional)
  • Dolby Digital 5.1 Sound: Yes
  • Vote and comment on this game: View Comments

Midnight Club: Los Angeles is a new racing game that follows the same open-plan style as Burnout Paradise in that you have to go looking for races, rather than just presenting them to you as selectable options, that latter of which worked much better for me and was one of my gripes about the most recent Burnout game, released earlier this year.

Okay, there’s no plot to this type of game and that’s a given and you know that you’ll be able to customise your car – and bikes later on – until the cows come home, but I’m the kind of person that just likes to get in a car and drive and, overall, there are times when I wish developers would just keep things simple. I don’t want to waste half my gaming time driving all over the shop to get somewhere, I just wanna race! Even worse, when you do find the person to race against… most of the time you’ve THEN got to get there, so you’re still not ready!

Plus, because you’re in a position of having to stick to the road you lose Burnout Paradise‘s options to go on stunt runs and jump off here and there, bar one or two minor jumps thrown in for no particular reason, one of which is featured in one of my pieces of video footage linked below.

Midnight Club Los Angeles Clip 1:
Good fun, but I came last!
Okay, starting at the beginning, the map overview makes it easier to note where the races, the difficulty of which is determined by the colour of the icon (green, yellow and red), and set a marker so you can them drive to them. Taking a hard corner at speed is great fun, although making small adjustments to the left or right result in the car almost lurching a bit in that direction rather than naturally turning. However, on the downside it’s clear the physics learned in the latest GTA title from Take 2 Interactive, haven’t been put to use in this one, and given that driving is the raison d’être here, it’s a bizarre omission to make.

The graphics are okay and at least move fast, but the music is mostly dance/rap and gets very tedious after a while. I would’ve liked to have added my own tunes to the game. Sounds from the cars are everything you’d expect. Location-wise, I understand this game is fairly faithful to many landmarks in LA, but I can’t confess to having ever been so I can’t put a finger on any one place in particular.

Midnight Club Los Angeles Clip 4:
Oncoming traffic can be deadly!
Most races take you from A to B via checkpoints, but some see you having to cause damage to specific vehicles, and in other cases the police will chase after you. Other standard options include the fact that you can progress to better cars, as well as bikes, but this will require achieving a sufficient increase in your level of ‘respect’.

In addition to the main Arcade mode, there’s also Goal Attack mode, which sets goals to win races with less than a certain amount of damage and within a certain time limit.

I don’t have online play, but if you do then this game will offer up to 16 players the chance to go for Capture the Flag, Stockpile (collect as many flags as you can), Keepaway (like Midtown Madness 3‘s Stayaway, where you have to try not to get hit by your opponents and, erm, keep away from them as much as possible.

Midnight Club Los Angeles Clip 5:
Go jump!
Random irritations about this title, crashing into oncoming cars is a royal pain, though, as at least Burnout Revenge managed to make an art of it, but here you crash and it slows down a bit, and then you get spun around at normal speed and the camera flips about too, and it all gets a bit messy, especially when it leaves you pointing in the wrong direction. Do this a couple of times and you’re out of the race – how pointless!

Even if you crash once, you’ll generally end up behind enough such that you just can’t catch up and may as well restart the race, which is very frustrating. Also, the cut-scenes between fast-talking ‘homeys’ don’t do much for me either.

Racing the car, itself, doesn’t feel as natural or that you get as big a speed boost as you do on earlier Burnout games such as that one. This is an odd thing, partly because of its random nature and partly because even when you do get it, it doesn’t stay with you so you can’t save it for later.

Midnight Club Los Angeles Clip 6:
I like a challenge!
Bear in mind that when you’re heading at speed along pavements, pedestrians dodge out of the way so you can’t kill anyone. In fact, if you’re looking for all action racing from the guys behind this title, go for my preference to play Grand Theft Auto IV and drive like a loony. It’s fab!

There isn’t much in the way of jumps or any way to leave terra firma and each race becomes fairly samey before too long. The plus is that while the first hour was pretty boring, as it took that long to get into the handling of the game, things do improve to a reasonable level. However, there are better titles out there and you’d be advised to rent before buying this one.

Overall, Midnight Club: Los Angeles is certainly not a Burnout-beater.

In this review, I’ve uploaded a number of clips which are as follows:

GRAPHICS
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
ENJOYMENT


OVERALL
Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2008. View the discussion thread.blog comments powered by Disqus = 0) {query += ‘url’ + i + ‘=’ + encodeURIComponent(links[i].href) + ‘&’;}}document.write(”);})();//]]]]>]]>

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