The story of the game is just there for being there and from your bland
character outward you will find little to care about other than winning. You
don't have to win every race to earn money and reputation points, but winning
speeds this up. Gaining rep opens up more for you to do and buy, and the money
lets you trick out your ride. I found this progression a bit too slow, with a
single victory not amounting to much money or rep. This is not helped at all by
the fact that you must drive around LA for everything but the garage (which you
can zip to from the pause menu). All of the parts cost about a single winning
from a race, but cars costs about 20 winnings and require you to unlock them by
gaining rep. What results is a very taxing system of investing a lot of time
into this game for a single car, only to have to invest so much more for the
next one. Take a game like Burnout Paradise where the all cars can race each
other and are not very difficult to unlock, and you will see that while Midnight
Club LA's reward system is genuine, it just feels like a rip-off.
 |
Los Angeles is beautifully represented, with all the notable landmarks and
areas of the real city in place, and all in nice graphics that are complimented
by a night and day time, as well as the occasional rain storm. It would be fun
to cruise around except the cops are not as forgiving to your traffic violations
as their GTA counterparts. You cannot speed through the streets into oncoming
traffic near a cop or you'll be forced to pay a fine. You should pay the fine
because the only other option is a high speed chase, and unless you can expertly
shake the cops quickly it will be hard when the whole of the LAPD is on your
tail. That doesn't mean it's impossible, but it is a nuisance regardless and
though it may be a nice distraction from the story and races, these chases are
extremely pointless despite the rep gain.
If you manage to cruise LA without the fuzz getting up in your grill, you
will have to navigate the enormous city to find your next race. Not only do ends
of your races not synch up with the starts of your next desired races, you still
have to find them. Your GPS map helps this, which lets you zoom and look at
every part of LA. Sadly, you don't have any options other than choosing a race
and zooming to look around. It would have been nice if, like GTA IV, there were
generated paths to a place you select; if like Oblivion you could zip to certain
locations; and I was hoping you could make routes yourself. As it stands, for
races without markers you really must use the GPS, and if you do you'll be
constantly pressing it and checking to make sure you know where to turn. The
best thing of the GPS is that you can scroll through all your objectives and
find out which ones offer rewards, such as cars.
The soundtrack is excellent, and I spent a good 30 minutes before I did
anything just checking out all the tracks and adding the ones I liked to my
playlist – this is by far one of the best soundtracks of any game I've played,
even the GTA games. The voice work is okay, nothing that stands out, and the
sound effects of the cars all sound real. The graphics are both nice and poor in
some areas. Again, the city of LA couldn't look any better, but textures are
poor up close and some buildings would be better served as cardboard boxes. The
cars have the most detail, but characters, especially citizens, look less
realistic. The lighting and shadow effects highlight the change of time, and
overall I would say the graphics are high quality despite attention paid mainly
to the cars.
I enjoyed this game less and less as the last-second defeats for no reason
started to wear on me. Rubberband AI killed almost all the element of you racing
other drivers, and what's left is more a game of you versus the field and any
mistake will cost you – sometimes making no mistakes can cost you as well! I
will admit, racing from the cockpit view helped, but in the end, I feel this
game would have been better served as the street races within a fictional GTA
LA, not an entire game unto itself. It's a one-trick pony, and that trick is to
race and race and race until you've beaten the game. What makes that bad for
this game is that the rewards take too long to obtain and cost too much. Couple
that with blatant rubberband AI and you get a game that wants you to play it,
but it refuses to give up much of its fun. Sure, you may enjoy the challenge of
this game and the time you must invest to achieve the goals set before you, but
at the end of the day this game is frustrating from start to finish.
- Gameplay - 75
- Story - 70
- Presentation - 80
- Graphics - 80
- Sound - 90
- Replay Value - 70
- Overall - 78
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
78%. 
« Page 1
