First-Hand Preview: Midnight Club: LA

If you weren't bothered about Rockstar's racing series before, you will be now that's it's been totally reinvented for next-gen consoles and looks truly stunning.

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So after we zoomed into street level, we land behind our Mitsubishi 3000 (crafted from 100,000 polygons across interior and exterior, rims and various kit - a level of car detail represented throughout the city), and it's time to race. Previously with Midnight Club you had to win all the races to unlock everything, but that's no longer the case. Players will accumulate 'rep' - that's 'reputation points' to those of us who are less 'street' - for finishing any race at all, first place or last. You accumulate these in order to exchange them for new races, vehicles and parts.

"We've done this because some guys are all about the cars and want to get as many as possible, others just want to get the one car and make it beautiful," explains Rockstar. "Others don't care about any of that, they just want races - so this way, you earn the points, and you unlock the game whichever way you want."

After our first race, we're cruising in a different part of town, with no messing around on menu screens. You can just tour around, look for routes or short cuts for your next race, or just go ahead and seek out another opponent as you please. In the first race, we picked up some damage, so for a few hundred dollars we can go to a 'quick fix' garage. Damage now affects your performance a little - but since it's an arcade racer, not to the point where it will annoy you, we're promised. Coming out of the quick fix, we're patched up but not much more - half the car's unpainted, but it's roadworthy and ready to get dirty. To look beautiful will cost a lot more than a quick fix - just like looking after oneself in real life, thinking about it.

We move on to a different car and a different time of day for our third race - we've already done daytime and sunset, so now we go to a more familiar setting for the series, night time, in a 1969 Mustang Boss - one of the iconic muscle cars of the era. The Rockstar rep playing the game decided to go for the 'Impossible' difficulty setting, which did point out could backfire. As it turned out, the end of the race was a photo finish, but our man just missed out on the victory. It was almost as if he deliberately cut it so fine to add to the drama, but no, it would seem races in the game are just this exciting.

Bikes are in, too. "Midnight Club was the first series that brought you cars together with bikes", Rockstar reminds us, "and it's still central to Midnight Club: Los Angeles." So players can expect high-end sports cars like the Lamborghini, muscle cars, tuner cars, sports bikes, choppers - something for every racing fan, by the looks of it.

Music, as always, is placeholder right now, but "representative of what we're going for", says Rockstar. Nonetheless, to give you an idea of what they ARE going for, we'll say that the music in the demo consisted of Dead Prez's "Hip-Hop" and Dead Kennedy's "California Uber Alles" - both adding real flavour to the L.A. race action, in the same way GTA4 really has a New York musical vibe going on.

The basic concept has always 'worked' with Midnight Club, it's just never been this appealing before. It's got the open city, and it has rightly earned a reputation as one of the fastest, most progressive street racing series around. Now, Rockstar is embracing the new hardware and looking to break conventions to bring new things to the concept, and so far it looks very promising indeed.

Frankly if it were up to me I would actually change the name of the game. Since Rockstar showed us the game, everyone I've told about how awesome it is was like, yeah, but, Midnight Club. While we can do our best to open up peoples' eyes to how different and bold it is at this stage, my fear is that people may bypass it and assume it's just another update in the series. In fairness, the fanbase has grown with each iteration of Midnight Club; the first sold 2 million units, the sequel 3 million, and DUB Edition, around 5 million. But were it my decision, I would probably call it something fresh and eye-catching. I don't know, maybe Other Arcade Racers Be Very Scared Indeed: Los Angeles. Not actually- but you hopefully get my point.

The series is about to enter the big time. Rockstar knows it - and has big plans. After our first-hand demo, they teased us by saying: "Midnight Club Los Angeles marks the beginning of something very big for us, something very ambitious, that's going to use the next-gen hardware in a way that other racing games haven't. It marks the beginning of an ever-expanding, ever-evolving world, and you're seeing the very first possible demo, of the first part of that."

We can only hope that means many more cities of this quality to come, including London, New York (just take the city model straight out of GTA4, perhaps?) and a proper next-gen Tokyo. All that is possibly to come, but first, we're looking forward to Los Angeles, in what is sure to be a revitalised, more popular racing series.

Midnight Club: Los Angeles will be released simultaneously on Xbox 360 and PS3 in second-quarter 2008. Stay tuned for more coverage.

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