Midnight Club Los Angeles – a great concept lacking execution

Heading into the holiday rush of games I decided to add Midnight Club Los Angeles to the top of my Gamefly queue.  It came with great recommendations, and I was yearning to play a racing game.  I'm a huge fan of the Project Gotham Racing series, but it's been about a year since the latest PGR game came out so I haven't touched a racing game since that time.  Needless to say I started playing Midnight Club at the perfect time.

As you may have discerned from the title of this post, the idea behind Midnight Club is excellent.  It's basically an open-world racing game, similar to a Grand Theft Auto title except you never get out of your car and the gameplay focuses entirely on street racing.  This kills a lot of the linearity associated with other racing titles because you're given free reign to ride around an accurate representation of Los Angeles, taking part in pick-up races wherever you go.  The world also factors into the races themselves, because you're never stuck to one beaten path in a race.  Every inch of Midnight Club LA is filled with shortcuts, side streets, and hidden paths for you to take advantage of and get a leg-up on the competition.  During a race you can go literally anywhere, which can be a help and a hindrance at times.  More on this in a bit.

The cars control great, and the racing element is very fun.  You'll earn money from races to upgrade and purchase vehicles, and there's a solid progression from low end "junk" cars to high end super cars as you play.  You can also get vehicles by winning tournaments, or racing opponents for pink slips.  One of my favorite parts about this game was the vehicle collection and upgrade aspect.  There's something very satisfying about beating an opponent who is driving a much nicer car than yours, and then adding that car to your collection for your own personal use down the road.  It's very addicting.

As I mentioned the races are free-roaming just like the rest of the game, so you can pick your way through a race however you like, as long as you hit the checkpoints.  This can be fun when you're hitting all of the correct paths and torching the opposition, or extremely frustrating when you take one wrong turn and are screwed into last place because you can't get turned around in time.  It's especially annoying on higher difficulty levels because the checkpoints for races become more and more spread out.  This gives you a higher freedom of choice to pick your way through the map, but also gives you many more opportunities to make mistakes which lead to a blown race.

The game also has some glitchiness to it.  The most annoying bug I ran into was the presence of phantom vehicles.  There's nothing better than flying down a city street and then *WHAM* - you run into an invisible wall.  A second or two later after you've blown your lead and dropped into last place as a result of the crash, a car will pop in right in front of you that you couldn't see before.  Pretty annoying.  It didn't happen all too often but it seemed to occur more and more as the game wore on, and always when I needed it the least.

My least favorite aspect of the game was the "adaptive" AI however.  I mentioned that on harder difficulties you're put under more pressure to take all of the correct paths without much guidance from the game, or you could take a wrong turn and end up in last place.  That would be all well and good if your opponent's AI didn't already know the perfect path to take every time, forcing you to have a flawless race in order to win.  Not only that but because Midnight Club Los Angeles is an open-world game, there's plenty of traffic just waiting to trip you up.

The last straw came when I was trying to win a tournament in order to add a new car to my collection.  There are several DUB tournaments in the game, each having a unique car prize for winning first place.  The tournament I was playing took place in the valley section of the game, an area filled with twists and turns that a normal car can't handle very well.  Unfortunately you have to race against a motorcycle which, of course, eats through the turns in the valley like they were nothing.  I tried and retried this tournament plenty of times without winning, and so finally I decided to just purchase a motorcycle and get the thing done with.  Like any logical person I chose to buy the best motorcycle in the game, so I could save money by not purchasing more vehicles down the road.  Big mistake.

The cars are ranked in letter classes (A being the best, B, C, D, etc.) and my new bike was an A class.  All of my previous cars were B's at best though.  So, even though I breezed through the DUB tournament I was stuck on, all of the races after that were much more difficult because the "adaptive" AI switched to all A class vehicles as well.  Now all of my old cars were completely obsolete and worthless, and I was stuck riding a bike that I pretty much hated using.  Bikes are fast, sure, but they also take more damage and are much easier to crash in...a feature that's important when you're racing down the traffic-filled streets of LA.

Not long after the bike debacle went down I decided to return the game to Gamefly, incomplete.  Despite having a lot of fun with the game occasionally, there was just too much frustration involved a lot of the time.  The fact that I was forced to use only one of my 10+ vehicles just because it was a different class was pretty weak, I must admit.  I may end up returning to this game down the road (restarting completely of course, so as to avoid this problem) but at this point I can't really recommend it over a game from the Project Gotham series.

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