Midnight Club: Los Angeles Hands-On

We go hands-on with the first in this reinvented racing series in our latest behind-the-scenes Rockstar preview.

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There are tonnes of different race types, initiated by flashing your lights at an opponent. Checkpoint races are the bread and butter; we played through a Dynamic Freeway race, there are Red Light races which are no-messing-around 'rolling start' one-checkpoint races to the finish somewhere else in the city. There's a race called Payback where you have to trash opponent cars as part of the game's storyline, Delivery Missions where you have to get from A to B within a time limit taking as little damage as possible, Time Trials, Pink Slip races where you stand to win a vehicle or lose your own, Wager races where you can select how much money you want to put down or lose it if you don't win. There's even 'race-before-a-race', where you race your opponent to the start line, and 'racing back after a race' - but those are skippable, if you prefer.

We started in a breezy Mazda RX-7 before moving into a weighty but less classy muscle car, and also checked out an Aston Martin Vantage for some finer English craftsmanship. Whatever your preference, all cars can be test driven, so you can choose to go back onto the street with no events, just racing around as long as you want with no restrictions, and you can then buy it if you like it.

Over in the garage, there are two ways of looking at customising things. On one level it's for the petrol heads who love spending hours customising individual parts of cars. But if that's not your thing there are also auto upgrade packs, where the game looks at your budget and changes things itself. The new cockpit view is rather impressively just as customisable as the vehicle exteriors; you can add neon, change the steering wheel, use parts you've gained from the game, you can even change the colour of the stitching for crying out loud - but again, you have the choice to select upgrade packages if you can't be bothered fiddling around.

In the current build you can't put your own photos and images onto the car exteriors as in Forza 2, (the garage is a work in progress, so there's a chance this may change) but there's still plenty of stuff to choose from - you can distort, resize and recolour a multitude of shapes to be painted onto your design, and you can play with individual layers, copy, paste and change layers in a similar vein to Photoshop. Naturally, we opted to make a cock-shaped symbol right on the top of our Aston Martin.

As for how damage works, there's a red meter that adds up cumulatively. It won't affect your top speed, but it might skew the steering a little. But there are various ways to fix it, like driving through a gas station and stopping by the pump for a couple of seconds - conveniently this also replenishes your nitrous, and even more conveniently, you have the option to go straight to a garage through the pause menu. If you're in a "series of races" race, then between each race you do a 'quick fix'. All that said, we spent more time trying to hit the gas station pumps to cause a huge explosion - and if you kill your car in a race, it's the end of a race.

Police can be irritating in this build (though they are just as likely to go for the AI opponents as for you during races) but they're still tweaking police system. We're also told that despite the police 'arrest sequence' showing armed cops, nobody ever gets shot. And you can't run the (surprisingly populous) pedestrians over, Rockstar confirmed to us (although it didn't stop us from trying throughout our play session).

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