Game Review: Midnight Club Los Angeles

Gerard Campbell - The Press

Midnight Club Los Angeles

For: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

From: Rockstar

Rating: T

Score: * * * *

Midnight Club Los Angeles is a zero-to-hero story involving illegal street racing that takes place in an open-world Los Angeles. You get to unlock all sorts of exotic sports cars, muscle cars and superbikes and then drive them as fast as you can through Los Angeles.

In the Career mode, rep points (experience) are all important in climbing the street-racing ladder and you earn points by placing in various street races. The good thing is that you don't have to win races to keep progressing.

To race, you use your vehicle's GPS to find races then flash your headlights at an opponent to start the race. Races include checkpoints, circuit races or time trials. It's all done at breakneck speed.

Want to see for yourself? Find it in the Military.com Entertainment Store

There's a good customization function where you can pretty much tweak every aspect of your ride from interior neons to two-tone paint jobs and the attention to detail throughout the game world is excellent, with plenty of recognizable landmarks, and the game uses the same graphic engine that Rockstar used to create the gritty New York city lookalike in Grand Theft Auto IV. Worth mentioning is the police force that patrols the city. Fail to pull over when they ask and it's a full-on police pursuit -- and these guys don't stop until they've taken you down.

During one high-speed chase down Sunset Boulevard a chasing police car actually rammed my vehicle, causing it to flip onto its roof. I was arrested.

As you would expect from Rockstar, the game has a killer soundtrack and MCLA shows that Rockstar knows how to squeeze every last ounce of processing power from the PS3 as the sense of speed is phenomenal.

MCLA delivers adrenaline and speed by the bucketload. Another winner from Rockstar.

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