Gameplay-wise, MC: LA is quite similar to Burnout Paradise. MC: LA offers fully customizable controls and cars, so if you want to put purple pearlescent paint on your ’Vette and map the gas pedal to the left trigger, you can do it. … I feel that we bring all the elements that people are looking for to a highly polished level. You can get a really cool game like GRID, that looks awesome, but it’s a track-based game.

It’s like, you can get open world, but it’s based on crashing a car. I had a chance to talk to Rockstar’s Jeronimo Barrera, and as he told it, Rockstar feels that no other racing title offers the variety and depth of gameplay experiences that MC: LA does:įor me … the racing genre has been splintered a bit. Really, though, that’s an unfair characterization - it’s selling the game short. My initial impressions of the game were the following: it’s essentially Burnout Paradise, but set in a real city (Los Angeles) instead of a fictional one (Paradise City). So I was very excited to get my paws on the newest entry into the franchise, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, which is the first effort on current-gen consoles. It’s been quite a while since my last experience with the Midnight Club series - the last one I remember playing was Midnight Club II on the PS2 back in 2003 (I have fond memories of jumping off of the Louvre Pyramid).

Hit the jump for my impressions of the first two experiences.

There, I played the single-player and multiplayer portions of MC: LA - and I also took a stomach-churning ride in an Audi R8. Well actually, that’s not technically true - the event itself was held at Willow Springs Raceway, which is located in the California desert in Rosamond, an hour and a half north of the City of Angels. Recently, I headed out to Los Angeles to get some hands-on time with Rockstar’s upcoming racer, Midnight Club: Los Angeles.

Midnight club 2 los angeles