Midnight Club 2

Review - Rockstar offer us racing at it's coolest. Chris takes the wheel.

Midnight Club 2 is obviously the sequel to Midnight Club for the PS2, and like the original it immerses players in the world of underground street racing, complete with hot wired cars, crazy opponents and annoying police patrols. Making things even more interesting is the option to take your racing online and challenge up to seven other players in some tire-screeching action.

Midnight Club 2 is a simple game to pick up and play. Within a few minutes of booting it up, you’ll be ripping up the streets with the best racers the AI has to offer. But that doesn’t mean your opponents are equally simple. The AI starts out easy enough, with Moses teaching you the ropes and taking it pretty easy on you, but after four or five races, you’ll be facing some of the toughest street racers around. As if trying to keep up with Hector and the other super-fast racers isn’t bad enough, you’ll frequently have to avoid police pursuit cars and helicopters. The cops can be just as ugly as the racers, smashing your car into a wall until you finally stop racing, or until you manage to lose them by blasting ahead at full speed.

The great thing about MC2’s gameplay is that every race is different, be it the racing style of your opponents or the actual format of the race. Some races are simple "get to the finish before everyone else does" affairs, while others challenge you to cross checkpoints in any order before everyone else, and still others need you to outrun the cops before you can even race. There are more than enough race types in this game, each of them enticing you to play it all the way to completion just to see what’s next.

Along with the wide variety of race formats is an AI that’s challenging and realistic. Early drivers are sloppy, speed-hungry idiots who run into everything in sight in their quest to keep their engines pumping. Later racers are exactly the opposite, knowing the limits of their cars and just how much they can push those limits without becoming a smear on the pavement. The AI racers will never let up on you. Just when you think you’ve left one in the dust, he’ll suddenly find a shortcut and come leaping out of a parking garage right in front of you. While the AI obviously has the advantage of knowing all the shortcuts, it doesn’t seem to abuse this knowledge, leaving you feeling challenged, but not cheated, by the computer.

The environments in MC2 are huge and well mapped. When racing in downtown Los Angeles, you’ll feel as if you’re in the real city, with pedestrian malls, warehouses, parking garages and aqueducts strategically placed to enhance the realism whilst also providing some shortcuts through the streets. Paris and Tokyo get the same detailed treatment with the ability to drive down the Champs Elyses, under the Arc De Triomphe and up the Louvres glass pyramid. During many of the races, you’ll be able to choose your route too, which allows you to explore every nook and cranny looking for the best shortcuts and checkpoints in the city.