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Midnight Club II Review
Mark Simons
02/07/2003
Another online Xbox racer, midnight this time, rather than midtown, but does it take the lead, or stall on the grid...
Midnight Club II takes you into the murky world of underground street racing, at night, sort of a club...
This title owes a bit to games such as Tokyo Extreme Racer, with a bit of MSR, GTA III with a healthy dose of indebtedness to The Fast and The Furious, for making this type of thing more popular with the masses, and for being damn cool.
Your first port call will be the career mode that takes you from the streets of Los Angeles to Paris and finally all the way to Tokyo. Starting off in a suitably rubbish motor youâll have to work your way up the street gang pecking order - winning races, upgrading your cars and avoiding the cops. Races are introduced via some interestingly rendered characters, with some amusing lip-syncing and less than amazing voice acting â“ it could almost be 2Fast2Furious, ahahahem...
Once in the game, youâll have to drive around looking for equally minded street racers and flash them with your headlights to get them to race you. What's quite nice is that the races are rather varied and sometimes things will happen like you'll be about to race, then the cops show up so instead of seeing who is the fastest you have to loose the cops before heading home. This is all quite funky and helps keeps things interesting rather than just offering plain old race after race.
As you progress through the career mode you get taught new tips and tricks that help you to get that little edge on your opponents, or as is more likely, keep up with them, for the artificial intelligence poses quite a challenge. You'll find yourself catching a lot of air in the game, so being told that holding down 'L' and moving the analogue stick will change the orientation of your car mid-air, allowing you to get a perfect landing, is rather useful. As are the various turbo boosts, available as nitrous or slip stream nitrous, techniques for getting quick starts and one or two other cool techniques besides. The gradual introduction of more complicated techniques gives even more depth to an already rather engrossing one-player mode, without overwhelming you with a load of complex controls at the start.
The cars featured in the game, are based on real-life models, but there are no licenses, possibly due to the highly illegal nature of the game, or possibly other reasons. Anyway, if you know your cars you should be able to work out which models have provided the inspiration for the vehicles in the game. It might take a little bit more work with the motorbikes that feature later in the game, not being leather-clad folks with no fear of half our skin disappearing on the tarmac, we can't say for sure if these are based on real models or not.
Each of the motors have different handling attributes, top speed, acceleration and handling, with the general trend to get progressively better as you progress. Wow, couldn't have seen that one coming, but it's the way to do it, and each of the cars does feel different, but this being an out and out arcade racer you won't get the subtle difference of handling as you find in more simulation in nature games, but that's probably not why you'll be buying this. You'll be buying this for the crazy sensation of speed as the camera goes all fish-eye and mad as you hit a nitro - pile down the street feeling like youâre going to break the sound barrier, hit a jump, fly through the air, tweak your landing to be nice and smooth, hit the handbrake then weave between some traffic before piling into a petrol station which promptly blows up taking your car with it. Yeah! That's what we like...
In addition to the well-stocked one-player game, Midnight Club II can be taken on to Xbox Live! for some top quality online racing against some dastardly humans. There are a few different gameplay modes on offer, cruise around the city, circuit race, capture the flag, detonate and a powerful custom race feature that allows you to create your own courses by placing checkpoints throughout the cities. Whilst it is a great deal of fun racing against real people it would be nice to have had a few more gameplay modes, as in Midtown Madness 3. On the flip side the one-player mode in Midnight Club II is a good deal better than what is offered in Microsoft's title.
All of this fun gameplay is wrapped up in some rather sweet graphics; setting the game at night allows some easy reduction of the draw distance, without resorting to noticeable pop up. Textures are quite nice, and given the size of the cities, we could forgive worse. Again car detail is not the best, but the quality of the lighting effects, the speed of the framerate â“ a constant sixty â“ means that with pedestrians and other cars milling around it all feels rather realistic and solid. The sensation of speed ensures that everything flies by so fast that itâs hard to take in all the details, and touches like the lens flare effects from car and streetlights are done very well, making things seem a lot more realistic than they actually are.
The graphics seem to be more than the sum of their parts, and in wide-screen with a fast car in a hectic situation and a lovely early morning sky hinting with shades of purple, pink and dark blue hinting at the sun about to burst through, well its rather lovely to look at.
Sound in Midnight Club II is a bit of a mixed bag; actually the sound isn't, it's just the music and the voices. The music is a bit of a letdown, the dance music is alright, but nothing amazing, and the hip hop tracks are just a bit poor, we could think of a lot more music we'd rather have in the game. Criminally the game doesnât allow you to rip your own music to the game, which would have solved the problem instantly. Sound effects are good, and presented in surround sound, which is what we've got used to these days. The voice acting is a bit clichéd and cheesy, but given the nature of the game, a pure arcade racer, this doesn't really matter, it's not trying to be Toca Race Driver now is it...
This is a really fun game, there's enough here to keep you interested for a while, plus unlike Midtown Madness 3 you have to unlock the cars you use in the multi-player mode by getting them in the one-player game. This means that you'll actually be quite good by the time you have a car that can compete online, and this is a good thing. With a solid one-player game and a good online mode, the end result is an insanely fun game; it doesn't push any boundaries, but it does what it does well. Admittedly we may be creaming ourselves with the prospect of Project Gotham Racing 2, but then that is a little bit 'cleaner' in terms of its racing, and not out yet.
