Midnight Club: Los Angeles - Eyes-On

The Midnight Club series has been around for a while now, improving with each version. The third game in particular struck a chord with Kiwi gamers, staying in the charts here for an impressively long time. Rockstar San Diego have been hard at work on a next-generation follow up for some time now, and when I got offered the chance to be flown over to Sydney to see how it was going, I hopped on a plane extremely quickly.

Midnight Club: Los Angeles is a street racing game based around tricking out a car with all sorts of snazzy (and expensive) upgrades, then finding other people to race. The city is completely open to you right from the start, and you can cruise around to your heart’s content. If you want to get money and respect, however, you’ll need to face off against rival cars in a series of races along the streets of LA.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this sounds pretty similar to something like EA’s Need for Speed street racing games. However, during the demo there were a few key things that really stood out for me, and should make Midnight Club: LA stand out from any other street racers on the market. Now, I’m really not a car person, so if you want a detailed list of the types of cars I saw, look elsewhere. Instead, here are some general thoughts on how I thought the game was shaping up:

The first thing that really struck me was the seamless nature of the whole game experience. It was obviously a conscious decision by the developers to take you out of the world they created as little possible. To this end, the only loading screen you’ll see will be at the start of the game – everything else will happen seamlessly. This feature was particularly impressive when you were on the map screen. While it looked pretty standard, as soon as you had selected a race or location you wanted to go to, the camera zoomed on down into the map, which was in fact the actual city.

The actual gameplay is just as seamless. Once you select a race you want to participate in, and have driven to the starting location, it’ll simply begin. Likewise, after the race is over, you’ll immediately go back to cruising around the city. And even if you completely wreck your car (something that will probably happen a lot), you can choose to simply have it auto-repaired instead of having to find a garage, albeit for a heftier fee. The upshot of this is that you don’t have to go out of your way unless you actually want to. In a similar vein, you don’t actually have to race towards a starting location – every currently available race is selectable from a menu, which will teleport you there instantly. While all of these features might not sound like anything major, when you combine them together, they create a much smoother experience for the player.

Of course, the game could be as seamless as a lycra jumpsuit and still not be fun if the core gameplay – the races – didn’t hold up. I was told that Rockstar San Diego are putting as much focus as possible on the actual thrill of racing, and on making the races feel and control exceptionally well. They’re aware that everything else – from storylines to car upgrades to graphics – won’t matter in the slightest if the cars don’t handle well, and if it doesn’t feel like you’re driving on the wrong side of the road at 100mph down a busy LA street. While I couldn’t find out for myself how the cars handled, I did get to focus on the ways in which the developers are trying to create an extremely visceral experience for the races.

The most obvious way they did this was with the camera work. It’s rarely static, even when it’s hanging behind your car – instead, it’ll vibrate slightly when you’re going at speed, shake when you hit something, zoom right in to the side of your car when you activate your boost, and (of course) pan around your car in the event of a spectacular crash. This might not sound like much, but trust me, it’s vitally important when trying to get across a sense of frantic speed – just load up Ridge Racer 6 if you want to see a game with a decidedly boring camera that really drags the experience down. Various visual effects also combine to enhance the frenetic nature of the racing. A subtle tunnel vision-type effect comes on screen while boosting; sparks (and parts of cars) fly everywhere upon collision; and the cars themselves manage to actually look like they’re a part of the world, rather than simply pasted on top of the track.

All of these things managed to get me excited about how the final version will turn out, even though I’m not normally a fan of the genre. The game isn’t due out until the first half of next year, so naturally there were a few rough patches. The graphics in particular were a mixed bag – there were certain aspects that looked really good, while other parts of the game world looked distinctly average. But if the developers can bring everything up to the same standard as, say, the impressive amount of detail on the cars, those who care about graphics should be completely satisfied.

From what I saw, things seemed to be going in the right direction for Midnight Club: Los Angeles. There are obviously many questions that have yet to be answered, but for now it looks like gamers will be treated to a racing game that – shockingly, thankfully – focuses on the things that matter the most, but don’t always get the attention they deserve.