Midnight Club: Los Angeles - Hands On Preview

As the second biggest franchise in the Rockstar treasure chest (behind GTA of course), the Midnight Club series has shifted an impressive 13 million units since the original title was released at the tail end of 2000. Since then, Rockstar has released two sequels (in 2003 and 2005), each of which has built considerably on its predecessors. Midnight Club II put cops on your tail, insane jumps and shortcuts across the cities of Paris, Tokyo and Los Angeles, as well as some colourful characters to race along the way. Following on from this, Midnight Club III stayed within the US (in Detroit, San Diego, and Atlanta) and provided some much desired custom modding with the help of its DUB license.

One thing that the series has pioneered since the very first game is open world racing. Each city has been presented in the sandbox style of a GTA game. While the races challenged you to follow various checkpoints (similar to those found in GTA race missions), you've always had the freedom to drive wherever your heart desires. Many other street racing series have been slow to pick-up on this format, with Need For Speed: Underground jumping aboard the bandwagon in 2003 and Criterion's Burnout only introducing the open world format in last December's Paradise. Make no mistake, Rockstar is the pioneer of illegal street racing games and it intends to keep things that way.

On The Prowl

While GTA IV opted for a smaller but denser game world than its predecessor, GTA: San Andreas, it appears that Rockstar has adopted the same mantra for Midnight Club: Los Angeles. As the name suggests, this fourth Midnight Club game will be set entirely in the City of Angels, which is a departure from the multiple maps of the previous two titles in the series. However, our hands on experience of the game calmed our nerves about this decision - this will be a much bigger and badder (in the 'ill' sense of the word) city than any of the previous Midnight Club maps.

Midnight Club's LA sprawls like the actual city itself, but it never looks or feels dull and uneventful. There's always plenty of traffic and a wider range of missions at your fingertips than previous Midnight Club games. Among the real world locations recreated in the game will be LA's famous beaches (the Rockstar guys initially demoed a race where you drive across one in a Merc), through the 'downtown' bump in LA's skyline, and up into the Hollywood hills. But these are just a few of the many districts in this interpretation of LA, which is certain to fiercely rival Burnout's Paradise City with ease.

Rockstar has also gone to town on the range of new race modes in the first next-gen Midnight Club. We had a chance to sample a few, the first of which was Freeway Racers. In typical Midnight Club style, your first task is catching up with one of these street racers and flashing your lights at them to start an event - this was a harder task than usual in this particular event. You see, these drivers race exclusively on the freeway (as you might expect), requiring you to follow them darting between traffic at breakneck speeds. When you do eventually catch up with them, the racing is no easier. Rockstar has nailed LA's busy freeways bordering the city and you'll spend most of your time trying to avoid dense clusters of traffic, pumping up your adrenaline levels as you squeeze through car sized gaps between the vehicles in each lane.

This level of traffic was a theme throughout the city and wasn't only confined to the freeways. We ran the risk of a fender bending T-bone at each intersection we passed in the game, and Rockstar has finely honed the balance of this traffic to get your attention levels at exactly the right state for each race (i.e. not blinking for the duration). This is more than we can say for the uncharacteristically barren roads of Paradise City, which left us wondering where all the carnage had gone.

We also got some hands on experience of Red Light Racer, a new event that pits you against a single opponent. Not only is there one opponent; there's also one checkpoint. It appears as a red beacon rising hundreds of metres into the sky on the other side of the city like the hottest nightclub in town. After racing your opponent to the start, the main race is from one side of the city to the other. While races with unordered checkpoints have allowed gamers to choose their own route in previous Midnight Club games, Red Light Racer offers more freedom than any previous modes simply by giving you a finish line and free reign to do what you want with it. That said, our particular Red Light Race was fairly unchallenging in terms of navigation (you could get there by straight lining it down a boulevard), but a volley of nitrous boosts soon upped the ante in that respect.

Upping the ante will form a key feature in another of the new modes called Wager Racers. These allow you to bet varying amounts of money on a race against a single opponent, with higher stakes leading to a more challenging race. But these aren't the only new modes for Midnight Club: LA - far from it. We won't list them all here because we didn't road test them during our hands on, although we will give special mention to Telephone Challenge. Rockstar informs us that you'll actually be able to place checkpoints according to your own preference using a handy GPS gizmo. It goes without saying, of course, that Midnight Club: LA will also sport the same race modes as the previous games in the series as well.

Throughout these modes the police are an ever-present threat. Whenever you're spotted doing something a bit dodgy, you'll hear police chatter over the radio before a chase ensues. We got one pursuit going and the cops were certainly harsh and not too dim either (thanks to a similar line of sight system to that of GTA IV). Rockstar mentioned that the pursuit system is currently in a state of balancing and that it may not be quite as harsh in the final game as it was on the build we played. Personally, we thought it was pretty accurate. After all, the LAPD aren't exactly known for being fair and even handed. TVG says bring on the fuzz!

In The Garage

In what was music to the ears of Midnight Club fans, the last game in the series not only included officially licensed vehicles but a detailed custom modding garage as well, and Midnight Club: LA will be no different. We got into the driving seat of a Mazda RX-8 (very much your starting-out vehicle - handles like a brick), as well as the bullying torque of a Ford Mustang Boss 302, and [drum roll] a much twitchier and more responsive Aston Martin V8 Vantage. All are fully customisable in the game's garage, which has been streamlined for ease of use but also retains the details of 2005's DUB edition. Gearheads will be pleased to know that individual car parts are still sourced to individual manufacturers, while less anorak prone gamers can easily just make the upgrades in complete ignorance of what they do.

As the Ford Mustang is one of the legendary cars for souping up, we got straight to work on Midnight Club's Boss 302 model. The good fellows at Rockstar gave us a blank chequebook to mod with (in exchange for favours that will never be spoken of again), so we decked out the Mustang with ridiculously wide rims, a two-tone sparkle paint job, and a chunky engine that peeped out of the hood. Thanks to the games new dashboard camera view, we did some interior design on everything from the seats and trim, to the dashboard and door panels. Getting the exact tones we wanted was easy thanks to a Photoshop style 'pipette' colour catcher and we landed on white for the main interior decor, neon blue across the dash and panelling, and bright orange for the trim - it looked like a Cryochamber from Alien.

Special abilities were also present in the garage (as they were in the DUB edition) and you can deck out any care in the game with abilities such as Zone (which allows you to slow down time), Roar (which parts traffic), Aggro (which makes your car a bit beefier in collisions), and a newcomer to the fray called EMP (which kills the engines of cars around you). Of course, you'll have to pay for these modifications by finishing well in race events, while a new reputation system unlocks the parts themselves and the vehicles to put them on. You're awarded 'Rep' points for simply finishing a race - although higher finishes get you more rep - and your rank will increase from 'Backseat Driver' to 'Navigator' etc. as you being to tally up these rep points.

There were many aspects of the visuals that impressed us during our hands on, with the camera work being first and foremost in our minds. Whenever you put your pedal to the metal from a stand still, the camera shakes as smoke pillows from your tires. Given that the cars are particularly difficult to control under wheel-spin, the shaky cam really adds to the experience. Likewise, whenever you drop nitrous you're treated to some camera direction that'll make things that bit hairier. One of the camera views from behind the car actually drops down onto the car itself and seems to stick itself to the rear end of the car on the driver's side (just above where the fuel cap would be). It makes controlling the boost and watching out for traffic that bit harder, so you'll have to be more careful than ever before with the nitro.

We also enjoyed the new checkpoints, which are now flares for the most part rather than the beacons of previous iterations. In conjunction with this, the radius within which these checkpoints will clock you has been tweaked and is no longer quite so harsh, so you needn't worry about darting right through the centre of them for fear of only realising that you've missed one when you're a mile up the road. Apart from that, LA looks stunning and is littered with shortcuts (some of which appear on the map and others that don't) to keep things varied. And last, but by no means, are the cars. We particularly enjoyed the smooth curves of our Aston Martin V8 Vantage and were terrified of damaging it in case we had to perform a quick fix between races (which means clashing door panels) rather than pulling up to the garage for a proper job.

Rockstar assures us that Midnight Club: LA will come complete with online multiplayer that gamers can jump into seamlessly from the single-player (in a similar style to GTA IV). However, no details regarding which race modes will be on offer is available at the moment. Keep your dials tuned to TVG for more info as it becomes available.