Genre : Video Game
Publisher: Rockstar
Players: 1-4
Retail Price: $40
Availability: PSP
Rockstar does an amazing job of bringing a quality racing title to the PSP in their release of Midnight Club: LA Remix. If you’ve been on the hunt for a racing title, you won’t be disappointed with the impressive amount of content LA Remix has to offer. The developers did a good job of crafting a custom version of their Midnight Club franchise that works well on a portable system.
The newest Midnight Club story follows your character’s progress as an up and coming street racer. There is nothing overly impressive about the story mode of the game from a narrative perspective, but it does a good enough job of keeping you informed of what’s happening throughout the city. You start out pretty low on the ladder and the only way to pull yourself up is by winning races and accumulating rep. You periodically have the opportunity to challenge other racers in their specialty race, eventually being able to take on the top racer and become the city champion.
Although the story mode doesn’t contribute an incredible amount of depth to the game, it doesn’t really need to, because the gameplay is where this title really shines. The controls in the game are spot on, and help provide one of the most impressive driving games you will have the opportunity to play on the PSP. The only real complaint I had with the way the game played is the way in which you are presented the check point system. There are times when the checkpoints are hard to navigate if you aren’t paying close attention to your mini-map in the bottom of your screen. I missed more than a few turns because I wasn’t sure of exactly where the turn was located, since the arrow were located after it.
All of the cars in the game handle just like you would expect them to, and the different types of vehicles help the game stand out. You can drive anything from a muscle car to a luxury sedan, and even motorcycles make an appearance in the game. Each vehicle has its own unique way it handles and provides you with a different experience. One other small point of contention I had with the way the cars handles is the way in which the game presents the incredibly fast movement. It can sometimes be extra difficult to avoid traffic since you are almost on top of the cars in front of you before you are able to realize how close they are.
On top of each type of car handling differently, each class also has its own unique special ability you can use during races. Tuner cars have the ability to slow down time and allow you to make tight turns while still maintaining your speed and avoiding traffic, while muscle cars have an ability called roar that creates a shock wave that explodes out of your car and throws other drivers off the road. There are three different abilities you will encounter during the game, and they are tied to a specific class of car. You are only able to use your special ability during the race if your special meter is charged up. The method for charging your meter is also dictated by the class of car you are driving. Tuner cars charge their special by driving safe and avoiding traffic, whereas muscle cars obtain energy from drifting through turns. These special abilities become an important part of your arsenal, and are incredibly useful to learn, especially on some of the later races that can be quite difficult.
Some of the later races can be incredibly difficult and you’ll quickly learn which types of races you’ll want to play and which ones you won’t. You have a substantial amount of freedom when deciding which event you want to participate in, and only in some circumstances does the game force you to take on some of the more difficult races in order to progress. You are normally given the option of which challenge you want to participate in based on green, yellow and red icons spread across the city map. If you want to try a race, you pull up to the icon and flash your headlights. The game offers an incredibly large selection of events to choose from that include anything from multilap checkpoint races to time trial events. This variation does a great job of keeping the game fresh and exciting in spite of its limited territory you cover.
One of the unfortunate aspects of the game is that you will probably get tired of driving the same routes in LA after some time. You tend to see the same race circuits repeated quite frequently because of the size of the city. Rockstar does a good job of trying to hold your attention by providing a large number of event types to choose from, but the map has a pretty limited set of circuits associated with it. Luckily for you, though, you don’t have to spend your entire time driving the streets of LA, as Rockstar has also added in Tokyo as a playable map. Once you get through a certain portion of the story you unlock the Tokyo career path that offers you not only a new map to play, but a completely new story and set of cars.
The car selection in the game is also incredibly robust and the customization the game allows you to perform on your cars provides a near limitless set of possibilities for your creative side to explore. The set of options may not be as fully featured as those you might find on the Xbox or PS3 versions of the game, but they are impressive for the PSP. I spent a fair amount of my time customizing the look and feel of my cars, and that was mainly only in the LA side. Each career has its own unique content that separates it from the other, and provides a full experience unto itself. You are not able to carry over your cars from one career to the other, but you do not lose any of your content if you switch between careers.
If you just want to get into some action and just don’t feel like going through the story elements of the game, you also have the option to play the arcade mode. Arcade offers even more possibilities for you to explore with games like capture the flag. You also have the ability to turn on powerups on the map that allow you to do things like stop your opponents car or turn them into a block of ice. There are a ton of options you can customize before the start of each race, like setting traffic and weather conditions as well as the time of the day.
I can easily say that I would recommend this game to anyone who is a fan of any type of driving game. You have a wide assortment of vehicles and gametypes to choose from, as well as two distinctly different maps you can explore. With the addition of Tokyo, it feels like you are given the equivalence to two complete games that will keep you entertained for hours. There were nights that I would tell myself that I would just play a couple of races, then still be up hours later trying to win that next event. If you own a PSP you should at least check this game out, but if you’re a PSP owner with a love of racing games, you have no excuse for not adding this game to your collection.
