Impressions of Midnight Club: Los Angeles

Why am I playing this?

I'd heard a lot about the game, but I wasn't expecting anything supernatural (well, of course, street racing on PC has been known for ages, and

how else could you surprise anyone here?), and it didn't even make it onto my priority shopping list right away. However, as soon as I managed to

get it used for 200 UAH (~800 rubles), complete with all the paid and free DLC, it firmly took its place

inside the console (PS3), gradually pushing everything else out. I got my fill of some pretty decent games quite quickly - FIFA

10, Virtua Fighter 5, Pure, Mafia 2, Devil May Cry 4 and others. But the MC:LA disc hadn't left the console for two weeks and

I only stopped spending hours with it now, having finished the career. The last time I spent this much time on an arcade racer was in

Underground 2, but even there I got tired of playing through it by the halfway point. U2 seemed deadly long to me back then, and it has

"only" 222 races. And MC:LA has more than 540 of them, and that's just the career.
Hmm, a diagnosis is definitely in order, but for whom - me or the game?



And it all started so innocently... Well yes, a big Los Angeles, and, as they claim in the review from Strana Igr, an exact

copy of it, complete with even the E3 exhibition building. I immediately noticed the resemblance to the Bayview city from U2 - apparently that one was traced from LA. But

Bayview is just a dead place meant exclusively for racing, whereas LA from MC is a truly living city of lost

angels. Pedestrians wander the streets, throwing unflattering words your way when you try to run them down (but

running them down, as you could do in MC 2, alas, isn't possible), shops are ablaze with colorful signs, and the walls - with huge

billboards, peaceful (until you show up) cafes are scattered along the sidewalks, trash bins stand in the alleys, in the supermarkets

• pots of flowers, in the parks - benches, etc. And all of it can be smashed and broken. And it will fly apart with a juicy crunch and

screech, just as it should in real life. The game's sound design is top-notch. Turn off the music and you'll

confuse the sounds of the game city with those happening outside your window, flinching at the sudden wail of sirens. Every object in the game

has its own sound - traffic, wind, a distant siren wail, the shouts of passersby, music from the racers' gathering spots.

You won't even notice how the sky darkens and a hot southern downpour begins. And now you have to put up the top of your convertible. But

the rains in LA are gentle, and they don't want to pour all day long, gradually letting the brightest star in our sky take over again. And

now the sun is setting and Sunset Boulevard is lit by its last rays, playing on the body of your Cadillac. Then the sky

turns red-brown and after a while the city continues to sink into darkness, from which it is

saved by thousands of streetlights and car headlights, making it seem like an even more amazing place, one that only

the chosen few get to enter.
Yes, perhaps the city from GTA 4 was more alive (and MC 4 uses exactly that engine, as far as I know). But it doesn't have everything

else that's here. Everything that ties this game to the world of an illegal lifestyle at high speeds.





But a city is a city, and the main focus of a car-obsessed person is, as you can easily guess, precisely on the cars. So,

what do we have in the garage? In the name of all women, what a selection! Just the class divisions alone - 4 classes (by

coolness), 4 groups (by price and availability) and a whole damn bunch of subclasses - SUV, muscle, tuner, exotic, luxury, lowrider,

bike. There's American classics, modern European luxury, Japanese ricers, and damn sport bikes...

Here are just a few names: Chevrolet Malibu, Pontiac GTO, Mercedes S600, Lamborghini Miura, Audi R8, AM DB9, Mitsubishi

Lancer Evo IX and X, Nissan Skyline GT-R R34, and so on and so forth. 43 cars in total, including DUB versions and 3 motorcycles.

DUB versions feature special wide bodies for some models. However, at the start of the career all these beauties

are unavailable, and you have to choose between the Volkswagens - a 1st generation Golf, a 1st generation Scirocco again, and a Nissan 240SX.

Personally, I started with the Scirocco. However, career progression started pretty quickly, and money flows like a river. The main problem is

availability of new cars - group 4 won't open up for a while, and trying out the fastest cars becomes "unbearable" long

before that moment. And full tuning becomes available even later...
An interesting system is used in the game - in order to unlock access to replacing certain body parts - you need

to win a certain number of times in a car of that class (muscle, SUV, etc.). For example, wide bodies only unlock

after 30 or 40 wins (I don't remember anymore). So there's a reason to stick to a pre-chosen direction of cars, and then

all the parts will unlock quite quickly.



It's worth saying that the game doesn't exactly shine when it comes to the number of parts (but only when compared to U2). Depending on the model, you have access to

several parts (from 2 to 8) for replacing the main components - bumpers, headlights, exhaust, and so on. However, it's worth noting that all

the parts are designed for a specific model, and you won't be allowed to make some uniform freak, as was the case with the unforgettable Auto Sculpt.

Besides, the cars in the game are put together, you know, pretty great as it is.
Nevertheless, you'll be allowed to repaint the interior materials, install neon inside and outside, change the tint,

install hydraulics, adjust the size of the tires and rims, change the tire tread, adjust the ride height, change the license

plate - in short, there's plenty of room for creative thinking. But the most important thing is the set of vinyls. There are more than enough of them here to

create whatever pattern you want. Ready-made designs, a large number of all sorts of lines, gradients, fonts, and a countless

number of layers you can use (honestly, I don't know what the limit is here, but 50 vinyls went on easily for me).

The only thing missing is a "mirror".





It's worth saying that this isn't a game where the entire gameplay revolves around tuning. Yes, it's street racing, but who

said that racing doesn't take the main place in street racing! It's the racing that makes up that amazing feeling of game

fullness that doesn't let you leave the screen, like a drug, even for a person who isn't a fanatic about games. The career

consists of more than 100 events (120 or so, can't count them), consisting of one, but more often two or three races. All races

are divided into the following types: win streak (win a certain number of races in a row), championship (win on points), bets

(money, or your car), time trial (you need to beat the set time, and then twice - your own, which sometimes

is insanely hard), car delivery (like in TDU, except that the time and damage limits here are extremely

strict), and well, regular races - circuit (2 laps) or from point A to point B. The duration of one track is about

3-4 minutes, and all that time you're in terrible tension, which I'd compare to online racing in serious simulators

like rFactor or LFS. But even there I had enough reaction to perform maneuvers at 300 km/h, make calculations, and devise tactics

for pit stops on the rare straights.


Here, though, I felt like a 70-year-old geezer who decided, after a half-century break, to

get back into games. Sometimes you can't even blink. And I'm not exaggerating, because I've already lost enough races just from

getting distracted for literally a hundredth of a second. And you will have to get distracted - the banal

unfamiliarity with the route doesn't let you look at the road all the time. And checkpoints on the road itself are often not enough - they show only the next turning point, and what's

beyond that is a dark forest and intuition. So you have to constantly glance at the mini-map, and then back at the road. And

switch instantly in your head. Zoned out here - missed a turn. Got distracted by the map - kissed a truck. And no

concessions for those who will play this. The routes were made by maniacs themselves, and sometimes there aren't enough swear words to describe their

wild imagination, and the traffic is as dense as nowhere else, and all these clueless drivers go where they need to, not giving a damn about you and your races.



That's what makes the game so insanely hard. And that's what makes it so thrilling.



Additional components of the difficulty are the presence of a damage model (you can completely "kill" the car), the huge speed

of movement (especially in upgraded A-class cars), and, most importantly, the computer

pilots endowed with anything but computer brains. Their cars always match your class (and on hard difficulty they're already in

A-class by the middle of the game), they know the route in advance, and often take shortcuts, which makes your hair stand on end when you try to follow

them through ultra-narrow streets and huge jumps. And, most importantly, they don't slow down to wait for you or, conversely, sharply

speed up when they see you flying forward. Simply put, I didn't notice any catch-up here. If there are hidden

assists for the AI, they have a cunning algorithm, and I personally wouldn't risk accusing the computer of cheating. The bots aren't sinless either, sometimes

they make mistakes, sometimes they don't take the shortest route, and you can always shove them into a ravine with a gloating smirk, i.e., there's no

"tank effect" for the bots here, like in some (read: many) arcades. All opponents in the game are personalized, and drive their own

personal cars. But I personally didn't notice any difference in their behavior. They're all very fast. Even on medium. Well, and hard and especially

hardest - that's if you're a hardcore grinder and can replay a race 5-10 times. By the way, you can only restart the first race

of mini-championships or series. And if you win it, the following ones will have to be taken on the first try. And the tracks in championships

are generated randomly, and restarting the same track to memorize it won't work. In general, after finishing the whole game, I

remembered more or less only a couple or three routes. And there are dozens of them here, if not a hundred. That's how it is.



The developers apparently got scared of what they'd made themselves, and allowed the player to use various arcade tricks, like

slowing down time or scattering traffic. I don't know, I'm not a fan of various cheating features. But HERE... even I sinned by

using them. Because sometimes it's a total nightmare.





Although Midnight Club 2 (the only one that also came out on PC, by the way), according to rumors, is even much harder. And whoever beats it, nothing

will scare them anymore... I don't know, maybe it's true.



Another pleasant point worth noting is the game's physics and handling. It's close to ideal for games of this type. The cars

are quite substantially different, and not just in the notorious acceleration-and-top-speed sense. You can feel the mass, the tendency to slide, and the

stability. Each car needs its own approach. And buying the Saleen S7, the fastest car in the game, doesn't mean easy

victories at all. I honestly don't know what kind of person you'd have to be to handle it at 200+ mph in the city. But riding a motorcycle in first person is even

more fun...



So, you've finished the career. It took you 3-4 weeks or about 108 in-game hours (personally, my game stats

counted exactly that many, though 55-60 of those hours were spent cruising around the city, which is completely unavoidable, since you can't just

teleport from one race to another). Your garage is packed with 30 hand-picked, fully upgraded rides, and, if you're really

persistent, you've got the secret Audi R8 (and getting it is a whole separate story...). And that's it? Not quite. Dozens of free racers

await you, whom you can find right on the map and challenge to a duel with a flash of your headlights. Besides the standard

city races, you can spice things up with freeway races, as well as traffic-light races, where you

plot the route yourself, with only the start and finish points of the course known...





Okay, time to wrap this up. What haven't I mentioned yet, for the full effect? Continuing the tradition of great music, the game has 97

music tracks of various genres with the ability to build your own soundtrack from them, a photo mode with the option to put

your car online on the official site and rate other racers' cars, a track editor, extensive statistics (you can

even find out how many miles you've driven and won in this or that car, etc.). All convertibles have excellent

roof-folding animation, and you can personally see the differences in design between the Aston Martin V8 Vantage and Lamborghini Gallardo. The game has a

superbly implemented
police force - probably the most realistic I've seen in games. No, it doesn't pounce on you like in NFS MW,
and it doesn't fire cannons from a helicopter like in NFS HP2. It acts exactly like in American documentaries about
violators.



And, of course, multiplayer. You can't even imagine the kind of tryhards you meet there... 168 million race wins or

168 million pimped-out cars... Think that's unrealistic? Just check the rankings on the official site...



Yeah. This is the ideal street racing game, a racing game polished to a shine that's been on consoles for 2 years already, and one that has no equal

on PC for the next 5 years (unless, of course, it gets ported sooner). And now I'm waiting for news about a new

street racing game from only one company. Rockstar.