Midnight Club: Los Angeles Multiplayer Preview

Recently I took a trip up to Auckland to meet the Rockstar guys and play some of the new Midnight Club: Los Angeles. What stuck with me was how simple the game was to get into – I’m a bit of a racing novice, yet could grasp the mechanics within minutes. With a complete absence of loading times and pesky menu screens kept to a minimum, the ‘way you play’ becomes very clear. Don’t get me wrong, there’s more than enough challenge within the actual game-play, it’s just the interface is remarkably smooth, refined, lean.

Rockstar have recently let us know what the go is on multiplayer in MC:LA, and keeping with the general vibe of the game, it’s all integrated into single player via a ‘Quick Cruise’ mode. A touch of a button will seamlessly send you (and your pimpin custom ride) online, where you can roll around LA with up to 7 of your mates (8 players in total). If you want to start a challenge, just send a message to your friend’s T-mobile Sidekick and you’re off. That’s it. All there is to it. Going ‘online’ will suddenly feel different to the more protracted ‘connecting to the internet’.

The multiplayer challenges themselves have been expanded from previous instilments of the series and improved upon. The traditional ordered race is here – race through checkpoints one by one to the end – as is the option to mess around with the best possible route through the checkpoints in an unordered race. A nice little addition to a standard circuit race is the opportunity to set it to ‘last man out’, where trailing cars are eliminated one by one at the end of each lap until only the victor remains.

A lot of fun will be had with the ‘landmark race’ mode, where you race from a single checkpoint on one side of the city to another on the other. The sneakiest will know the shortcuts and nuances of the streets - of which there are many - leaving the losers stuck on the highway (probably honking their horns behind one of those annoying ‘heavy-loads’.)

There are a variety of capture the flag options, including a chaotic ‘free-for-all’ mode, and a team-based ‘split-base’ mode. In ‘split base mode’ each team has a base and a flag between them; whoever has the most flags at the end of the time/flag limit wins. Another chance for some co-op play is in the ‘base-war’ mode, where players must defend their own flags while encroaching on the other teams.

True frenetic mayhem will definitely be had in the ‘free-for-all-stockpile’ and the team-based ‘stockpile’ modes, where clusters of flags will appear all over the city, with the catch that you can only take one flag from each cluster. In the ‘free-for-all’, there is one less cluster than there are players. Expect swearing.

My personal favourite is the ‘keep-away’ mode, where one impish flag is the only objective. Once you acquire the flag, you must keep it away from other players as long as possible, acquiring ‘flag time’. The player who can hold onto the flag the longest is the winner. Again, whether you sink or swim will come down to your tricksy knowledge of the sprawling LA streets.

As in the single player, you’re far from unaided in MC:LA. Powerups are littered throughout the city, and some of them have a distinctly ‘Mario Kart’ vibe, which is certainly no bad thing. There’s the ‘Disruptor’, which distorts other players vision, ‘Pulse’ which tosses challengers cars up in the air, and the wickedly sinful ‘Ice’ - a power up to turn your foes all cold and slidey. There are also power ups which will mess with challengers steering and brakes, ‘Shield’ powerups which will render you momentarily invisible, and ‘Mirror’ powerups that will reflect your foes attacks straight back on them. Beautiful.

Finally, Rockstar have appealed to the vanity in all of us and let us share our customized cars online in ‘Rate My Ride’ – not just share them, but let other players buy them. Players will be paid the money for the car plus an extra $10,000 of in game cash.

So there you have it – frenzied, playa vs playa action. Midnight Club: Los Angeles is released later on in the month, so keep it locked onto nzgamer.com for the full review shortly.