Midnight Club: Los Angeles

the best game of street racing
perfect cars

Pimp your ride and race through glamorous Hollywood at breakneck speed. True to the spirit of street racing, Midnight Club: Los Angeles places you in an environment with complete freedom to take on races or cruise around while terrorizing pedestrians and evading the police. You play an unnamed racer starting his career in LA, earning street credibility and cash by racing. As you progress, you meet racers who constantly challenge you to tournaments and even risky wager and pinkslip races where you can stand to earn or lose money and vehicles. Other characters will hire you for car delivery missions or to seek and destroy a marked vehicle. Races early in your career can prove challenging when you lack funds to tune your car or buy better ones.

Do not be surprised if you spend hours trying to win a race as unpredictable and dynamic factors such as traffic, police intervention and sneaky opponents trip you up. Be warned: The police are persistent and difficult to outrun - if arrested, you will be fined. Racing in the streets without barricades can easily lead to wrong turns. Although the mini map can guide you back on track, the mistake is costly on expressways where there are limited exits. Be warned that playing Midnight Club: Los Angeles requires intense concentration as you must focus both on the map and the road.

Midnight Club: Los Angeles features various categories of cars for racing including tuner, muscle, luxury and even motorcycles. The beauty of motorcycles is their agility in navigating narrow ramps or sharp turns. As you progress, you can install one of four special abilities in your vehicles. Aggro makes your vehicle temporarily invulnerable and Zone slows time giving you precise control. There is EMP, which disables your rivals' vehicles and Roar, which pushes them away from you. Modding vehicles is a no brainer - you simply buy standard upgrade kits for components like engine, brakes and nitrous. Midnight Club: Los Angeles also offers plenty of customizations to pretty up your ride - from decals to paints to body kits topped off with options for multiple layers, colors and even resizing. Clearly, Midnight Club: Los Angeles flaunts aesthetics over physics. If you get tired of racing, cruise around and explore the game's realistic rendition of LA. You will be rewarded with the discovery of shortcuts and hidden packages.

Cruising also lets you enjoy the scenery which you barely notice during races - transitions of light in the day and night cycle, dramatic weather changes and even glistening roads after the rain. Midnight Club: Los Angeles's online multiplayer mode offers adrenaline-filled fun. Apart from ad hoc races, there are various "capture the flag" games played either one-on-one or team against team. Sweaty palms are guaranteed in the thrilling Stockpile game in which you pass a hidden bomb to someone else before it detonates. All said, Midnight Club: Los Angeles challenging races early in the game might scare off novices though its elementary vehicle moddling system might put off hardcore racers. Although it does not add anything new to the racing genre, its entertaining online mode and accurate depiction of the actual LA locale offers plenty of bang for your buck.