Midnight Club: Los Angeles

Let’s start with addressing the elephant in the room, is this Need for Speed? Yes, however, it is Need for Speed with improvements and more player freedom. Seeing Rockstar create another open-world game is no surprise, but competing head to head with Need For Speed and other racing games is a bit odd.

Graphics and Scale

This game has a massive open world for you to race through, larger than the past three titles in the series combined. The game also includes a day-night cycle with weather effects and of course local traffic. For a game that was released in 2008, it looks pretty darn good, but not as amazing as some other games on the PS3 and Xbox 360.

However, I think this is mainly because they used the power of this generation for more than just graphics. When roads are wet from rain, it affects how slippery it is and instead of focusing on immense detail, the game leans more to having nice lighting. Looks really nice during any time of the day-night cycle.

Gameplay & User Interface

The gameplay is smooth and controls well. Bumping into other cars or walls feels how you’d expect it too and each car feels unique. The user interface is similar to Need for Speed in a lot of ways but does a better job of getting the player into actual racing events faster, without cutscenes, long loading screens, or gimmicks getting in the way. The game also allows you to use ‘Rep Points’ to upgrade your cars and customize them in just about any way you can imagine. The game also offers a lot of freedom, allowing you to race any other racer at any time, however, boss races only appear once you’ve worked your way up by beating other racers first.

Features

Throughout the day-night cycle the density of traffic changes, with medium amounts of traffic from morning to early afternoon, with heavy traffic in the evening, and little traffic at night. Roads become slippery when wet, and of this game features police. Sadly, the game does not feature split-screen multiplayer, but it does feature online multiplayer, but I’d be surprised if the servers are even online let alone no empty. This game hardly has a story, you are a nameless protagonist given vague and genric reasons as to why to race and become the best in the city while making a lot of money while doing it.

The only real flaw this game has is the AI racers essentially cheat in order to scale the game’s difficulty. They magically get speed boosts despite them taking a corner poorly, when you use nitrous they also somehow use nitrous despite not actually using it. A common and cheap way to make a racing game challenging. My only other complaint would be that it only takes about 10 hours to complete. That’s not particularly short but I’d expect more of a company like Rockstar, and most racing games.

Pros

• Good lighting
• Good customization
• Good gameplay
• Easy & Fast UI
• Simple story that doesn’t get in the way

Cons

• The map doesn’t rotate views which can make it hard to navigate sometimes
• No Split-screen
• AI Racers Cheat