Midnight Club: Street Racing

"Not that great, but a good effort by RockStar and a solid launch-day title"

Midnight Club Street Racing is a launch-day racing title for the PlayStation2. The subject: Night-time street racing using taxis and the other three stereotypical types of street cars (lowriders, hatchbacks, trucks), on three major cities’ actual streets. A short introduction to your reviewer – I’m a university student, very fond of racing games, and proud PS2 owner. I do street-race in real life, and am an aspiriring automotive engineer.

Graphics: 8/10
The graphics for this game are actually quite nice, especially for a launch title. Your cars and foreground objects are very well done – cars are smooth yet featured and textured. Other cars as well as the lighting effect look great, and what is so impressive is the detail paid to “eye candy” – pedestrians, signs, street signs, stoplights, light posts and mailboxes and other such objects. But in one sense, that’s where this game fails – while the eye candy is there, and plentiful at that, the detail paid to them is nowhere near the detail given to the cars and streets and buildings etc, so they wind up looking out of place and more of an eyesore than eye candy. In addition, this game has a lot of problems with jaggies, especially on s-video... and the background scaling effect is very poor.

Sound: Effects 10/10; BGM 5/10
Sound: The sound effects are some of the best I’ve heard in any racing game – lots of horns, collisions, metal against metal, typical city stuff. What’s so great is that they sound realistic, yet at the same time are varying, so it doesn’t all sound the same over and over again. The pedestrians issue funny quotes as well when you “accidentally” run them over. The engine RPMs are well re-created also. However, in terms of background music, MCSR quite simply has none. It’s just a very dull repetitive beat in the background with a little single-line bass and synthesizer movement. In a sense that’s a good thing – the concentration of the game is more focused on the great sound effects and the racing. Most of the time you won’t notice that the BGM is sorely lacking, but at other times, I viciously wanted to pop my own CD into the player.

Gameplay: 7/10
The game features an arcade-style racing system and physics – high-speed turns, not much braking, and impossible handling (you’ll never spin out). This will not be appealing to gamers looking for any realism in driving. Other than that, though, the game flows very well. My only complaint is the R1 powerslide, which (when done correctly) essentially lets you take any turn and maintain most of your speed, with most of the cars. With some of the cars you can take anything up to a 90 degree turn, no matter how small the roads are, with absolutely no speed loss. This takes most of the challenge out of the game – I know others have complained that the game is too difficult, but armed with the powerslide, even the world champion is not a big deal.

In terms of your goals and what you have to accomplish, there’s plenty of work to be done in career mode. You must battle your way through several groups of racers, each with their own style of cars, to win unlock new cars and new cities. Unlike some initial reviews that I remember way back from October on other game sites, there IS a point to this game.

The final problem with gameplay is that there is no variation in the mission environment. What I mean is, on any given mission, if a truck barrels across the course at a certain time during the mission, that event will happen every time. So, on your first attempt at a course, you might run into that truck causing you to lose the race... but you know it’s going to happen next time, so instead you bump your competitor into the truck instead, and pass the truck yourself – and it’ll work every time. This takes away a lot of the challenge.

Replayability: 7/10
The actual career mode of the game is fairly short, especially after you get well-oriented with the course. What this game offers are several other modes, including my favorite, Capture The Flag. Typical CTF rules – get the flag, bring it back to a certain point. CTF mode is insane when you play multiplayer and throw in a few computer cars. I’ve spent many hours playing this mode.

Also, the tracks are detailed enough that you can have lots of fun exploring the city and trying different things. As a current university student in NYC, the city’s recreation is just mind-blowing. All the major streets and buildings are present, and it’s great to imagine driving down Broadway at 100 mph. :)

The biggest problem, though, is that there just aren’t enough cars to unlock to make this game really interesting. There are only four types of cars, and four variations of each, plus a few scattered bonus cars... and that’s it.

OVERALL SCORE: 7

Final Thoughts - and my honest opinion
This game was a lot of fun for me for a week or two, but its appeal really wore off quickly. I just didn’t like the city graphics – they were good, but didn’t feel right, something about the scaling as I mentioned above... and even just halfway through the game, there wasn’t anything really engaging to keep me going. The missions were all basically the same thing – hit a couple checkpoints and beat your opponents to the finish. After spending time driving around in the cities and fooling around, I put this game away for rest.

While I didn't factor this into my above score... this WAS a good buy - but only on launch day. Now, with great racers like TXR0, GT3, and LeMans 24 just around the corner, there’s really no point getting this title.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/27/01, Updated 05/27/01