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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Traditional racing is a comfortably familiar experience, albeit enlivened no end by the testosterone-infused tech, and we quickly got to grips with the arcade handling, pulling off wheelies to deny rivals the benefits of our slipstream and tickling the handbrake to power-slide through intersections. The same can't be said of the battle matches.

Capture the Flag (also featured in Midnight Club 3) is almost exactly what it sounds like, though grabbing that much-prized virtual entity isn't enough in itself - you'll have to deliver it to a distant safe zone while everybody else tries to shunt you into the Pacific. Keep Away, by contrast, sees each player trying to hold onto the flag for as long as possible. Where Halo left you incapable of defending yourself while in possession, MCLA slows you down to a crawl, necessitating canny navigation if you're to escape retribution.

Previous Midnight Clubs equipped the player with some decidedly implausible powers, and Rockstar hasn't let the side down this time round, though in some ways we wish they had. While it isn't quite Russian roulette, the potential for random aggravation is there: buried deep beneath MCLA's bling and trash talk is a strand of Mario Kart DNA. Confrontations frequently disintegrate into a chaotic free-for-all as combatants reverse each other's steering, cow-punch each other sideways, white out each other's screens and encase each other in ice. Motorbikes have the edge in such encounters, being smaller and nippier and therefore harder to ram/freeze/telekinetically assault.

Scrums are generally followed by a period of frantic minimap-scrutinising as everybody tries to work out who, amid the vehicular carnage, managed to slip clear with the flag. To clarify the proceedings, Rockstar San Diego has slapped the flag carrier with a fat yellow icon, but this can be rather distracting for the player in question.

Taken together, the slipshod battle modes and unpredictable city life threaten to muddle the multiplayer component's otherwise smooth progress to the finish line. We need a weekend away with the beast before we put such criticisms to the proof, of course, and even if it suffers from a lack of precision, Midnight Club Los Angeles remains one tasty roadster, a fresh benchmark in open-world racing - slathered to the gills with next-gen grease.

Stop back in a couple of weeks for our take on a finished build. The game's out October 21 in NA and October 24 in Europe.

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