Unecessarily Difficult
A Customer from Leeds,
28th November, 2008
Over the past year, we've had several new racing games released, and both, in my opinion were very good. Grid had the good combination of the GT seriousness and NFS customisation, and the Prince of Persia rewind abilites - a good mix. Need For Speed: ProStreet, while slated by the critics, I thought was also very good. Lots of popular cars and masses of scope for customisation, plus good music. Now Rockstar has taken a break from tearing up the streets of 'New York' and shooting grannies and instead released a game about tearing up the streets of Los Angeles - Midnight Club: Los Angeles. You play as some east-coast american dude who I can't remember the name of who arrives in LA claiming he can 'drive a bit' and you have to help him rise to the top of the racing scene by beating other drivers with your superior driving skillz and superior insults. For the most part, the gameplay is pretty good. You earn cash and rep (as always...) by winning races, which get more frequent and more difficult the more rep you have. Fans of Burnout will like the setup in that you're free to explore anywhere and everywhere from the get-go, and to participate in most of the races, you simply set the desired race on your GPS and go flash your headlights at them. The annoying part is that whenever you fire up the game, you automatically start in one of the two garages, which are miles away from anywhere, so you have to drive miles to your races, which will either get frustrating or boring as you can either drive at breakneck speed, crash an infinite number of times, and start the race with a bashed-up car (which you can instantly repair by restarting the race oddly...) OR you can drive like a pedestrian and take 20 minutes to get anywhere by which time you'll be so bored that you're eyes will have dried up. IIn addition to this, the boys in blue will frequently appear out of nowhere, and you have to slam on your brakes and obey the speed limit until they're out of sight, or you can try and outrun them. Compared to the master of police chases - the NFS series - MC:LA's chases are rather tame and broken. The game says they have to 'lose visual contact' with your car, which for the most part is a lie. Several times I've been tearing down the highway at 200mph with no police in sight, and the persistant idiots still use their telescopic satellite vision to spot you. The chases are so tedious that most of the time I'll just stop the instant I'm chased and pay the fine than smash my car up trying to outrun them. The one good thing is that the police's speed is a normal car's speed, so if you have a suitably fast car, you can simply drive fast to outrun them, which wasn't the case in NFS Carbon, where by some administrative miracle, the city's police chased you in Corvettes if you were wanted enough. The driving physics are a little off as well, with your car being highly prone to flipping, which you'll be doing a lot of, as it's almost impossible to not crash in every race, and you don't get the impressive spectacle of your car being smashed to bits like in Burnout. Until you get to the top-tier cars and high-spec parts, the cars also seem to accelerate slower than most horses, and like Burnout, there's nothing more infuriating than clipping some estate car at 170mph 5 inches from the finish line and watching your opponants take 1st, 2nd and 3rd while your car's still crawling it's way to 60. The Nitrous also seems rather lacklustre, and the effects will seem negligible until higher-spec cars. The rep system is also annoying, as there's no indication as to when or how you unlock performance parts and/or better cars, they simply become available when you acheive some random number of rep points, but I can safely say that you should have unlocked everything by 30000 rep. The customisation, while good, isn't as varied as NFS ProStreet. The most you'll be doing is changing a few body parts (but no precision moulding of said parts) and changing your colours. I tried doing the vinyls, but like prostreet, the controls are fiddly, slow and it takes hours to get anything out of it. I just went with a white car with a black centre stripe and that was it. There's also very few different parts for the cars, usually with only about a max of 5 different parts, however I did like the inclusion of the neon-underlighting, tacky though it is, as well as the interior customisation, which is completely redundant unless you like the ultra-realistic feel of the cockpit view. There's also a good range of cars, but not as many as I'd have liked, with all the standard mustangs, lambos and fords there, which a few 'DUB' editions thrown in (whatever that is...). They also included bikes, which makes a nice change, but they only included 4 of them, and they are also massively difficult to drive as they are harder to control and take damage a lot more easily. Rockstar also included 4 different abilites that you can use whilst driving - Zone, EMP, Aggro and Roar (also known as 'the Moses'). Zone is like speedbreaker in NFS Carbon - time slows down and you get better control; EMP is just that, Electromagnetic Pulse, it affects all enemy cars within a radius around yourself and kills their acceleration for a bit; Aggro makes you invincible for a short time, and makes cars (and coaches!) bounce off you like pinballs, very useful if you want to take out opponants by rear-ending them, and Roar...well...remember that scene from Bruce Almighty where he conjours up his supercar and then makes everyone's car move to the side of the road? That's Roar. All cars, including opponants cars move out of your way, allowing you to get through. These abilites are quite a nice addition to the game, and, if used correctly can make the difference between a loss and a win. The graphics are also good - textures look smooth, and the lighting isn't blinding llike it was in Burnout, but later in the game when I started to go 200mph+ I found that the road simply turned into a blurry grey square while the game struggled to keep up with the speed - not acceptable in today's high graphical standard. The sound is also good - the cars sound like their real life counterparts, and the soundtrack includes a good range of songs. However the comments you constantly get from your opponants and the protagonist get annoying very quickly, with either party crackin' wises every 30 seconds. I will concede, however, that going 'Woo!!' when doing a big jump or activating NOS is acceptable. But all the little flaws I've mentioned so far are completely overshadowed by one MASSIVE problem. In videogames, there's difficult... There's Call of Duty 4 on Veteran difficult, and Racedriver: Grid on Ninja difficult...these are acceptable levels of difficulty as you are not required to play them to enjoy the game, but Midnight Club: LA takes those difficulties to a new level. I have never played a more brutal game in my life. The AI know every single shortcut and back-alley and *always* takes them, they always know the fastest route to every finish line and are always once second behind you, waiting for you to inevitably screw up and then smash into your car and then criticise *you* for hitting *them*! Now this wouldn't be a problem if the difficulty was based upon the cars they drove, but ooooh no. In every series or tournament, you always face the same opponants in the same cars, as opposed to having different cars depend on the level. Instead they simply driver slower or faster depending on the difficulty level, so you can't upgrade your car to make yourself faster, so they're *ALWAYS* going to be faster than you. It was after trying the DUB tournaments several thousand times and losing every single time that I gave up and sent this game back...and don't sit there thinking that I suck at racers, I beat NFS ProStreet on King and Grid on Extreme. So unless you're a massive fan of racers and are a prodigy at them, don't bother as you'll just want to throw your controller through the TV by the end of it. The Good: Nice range of cars, good environments, good graphics most of the time, good sountrack. The Bad: brutally and uncessarily difficult, annoying comments from other drivers, little customisation, car physics are a little off, quite a grind to get to the end.
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