Midnight Club: Los Angeles: Multiplayer

Our final hands-on preview of Rockstar's major racing title reveals new tidbits and smashes through multiplayer.

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By Kikizo Staff, October 1, 2008

First thing's first: our top five trivia facts from our latest hands-on with Midnight Club Los Angeles:

• Rendering engine - the more we see the camera zoom from satellite level down to street level, and now that we have been able to move it around freely at various heights in between, the more we're convinced that RAGE is one of the most powerful engines out there today. These sequences and the fact that it's all completely realtime are incredible.
• Pedestrians - pedestrian dialogue, just like in GTA IV - some choice quotes included "does your neck hurt? I'm a lawyer!", and "I bet you feel real mature right now".
• Downtown - If you know what you're looking for you can see Home-of-E3, the LA Convention Center, and the adjacent Staples Center from satellite view. And you can obviously drive your way towards it at street level if you know the roads. This applies to the entire map if you know LA well.
• Control - There's really not much use for the brake here - using the handbrake will do just fine! When on a bike, hold down B to go on two wheels.
• Multiplayer - it has now been confirmed to support 16 players, and there are some particularly fun play modes, including the likes of CTF. This preview will focus on multiplayer.

Even if you didn't catch our thorough, singleplayer hands-on a couple of months ago, you'll probably be familiar with Midnight Club: Los Angeles. The first Midnight Club helped put the PlayStation 2 on the map way back in 2000 thanks to an unprecedented level of environmental fidelity and some muscle-bound motors. Online multiplayer and licensed cars cropped up in the second and third iterations respectively, to profitable effect: the series topped 12 million copies sold worldwide in March. Open world racers don't get much more lucrative than this.

Small wonder, then, that Rockstar put its veteran San Diego team to work on a next generation outing after getting shot of Table Tennis. With the single player looking truly top-notch, the publisher came knocking in August for our thoughts on the multiplayer component. Having been liberally wined and dined (OK so it was pizza and coke) at Rockstar London's offices, we were invited to test our mettle against the brightest and best of the development team.

As we noted in July, MCLA's Molotov cocktail of real-life horsepower and arcade mechanics cranks the pacing well into bat-out-of-hell territory. Hit the boost and the view telescopes as though gaping for air, engine rumble grabs you by the wrists and your surroundings become one pearlescent smear of chrome and neon. But MCLA isn't just fast - it's also rather cluttered, with (indestructible) shoppers, lampposts, scraps of newspaper, concrete bollards and - of course - other drivers all doing their utmost to transform your pristine whip into so much high-velocity scrap metal.

Then there's the layout of Los Angeles itself, a vast and intricate web of underpasses, blind alleys, broad boulevards, pedestrian districts, seaside walks and hilltop avenues. Getting the better of your rivals is partly a matter of keeping up with the speedometer and partly a matter of knowing the terrain inside-out - which freeway exit to take, which bits of main street scenery mask vital shortcuts - and your attitude to the game, as in Midnight Clubs past, will depend on whether you find this freeform approach stimulating or frustrating.

That much is true of the single player, and thanks to Rockstar's city-synchronising techno-wizardry, that much is true of the online modes. In fairness there's an option to turn down the volume of NPC traffic, but even at the lowest setting you and your mates will be blasting through a lot of incidental polygons - and then there are the dynamic weather effects, with rain having a very noticeable (read: catastrophic) effect on your steering, and the ever-watchful, free-roaming caffeinated fuzz. If you're accustomed to Ridge Racer and its ilk, MCLA's fusillade of emergent features may leave you gasping for breath.

On the other hand, putting together a party of hot-rods is simplicity itself. Your version of Los Angeles can be merged with those of your friends - up to 15, to be precise - at any time via some glossy menus. Once everybody's on-board, you can jump straight into one of two broad match categories: straight-down-the-line, checkpoint-to-checkpoint rubber-burning or one of the wacky 'battle' modes.

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