Midnight Club: Los Angeles Hands On

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Freeways, which loop around Midnight Club's LA, get their own race-type, where you cruise up to a travelling rival, match their speed and flash your lights to initiate a race to a junction a few exits away, and there are numerous other disciplines to look out for: circuit races, wager races, pink-slip races - and contests where you race off to a distant set of traffic lights. Away from the game's structured challenges, you can hunt down secret jumps (and take advantage of a GTA-style slow-motion camera to enjoy them), and knowing Rockstar we doubt it'll be the only extra buried amid the angels.

Performance upgrades can be automated, but that doesn't mean you can't tip the balance between start and finish, either. As with MC games of the past, your experience unlocks abilities like Agro, which lets you tear up traffic, and you can always draft your opponent to fill up a small boost meter. New to MCLA is a handy EMP for wiping out enemy electronics, which ought to be especially amusing in multiplayer. Not to mention damaging, but fortunately you can apply a quick fix between races, which stitches your wounds with random second-hand parts, before returning to the garage later.

Rockstar's anxious to avoid lots of pratting around on load-screens to get stuff done, though, so the garage is generally only somewhere you go when you want to spend money or test-drive a new toy. And there are no load-screens. There are a few minor pauses as the camera zooms in and out from GPS overview to street-view, but the disguise is a good and short-lived one. By hitting up on the d-pad while you're racing, you can check out a quick overview map, too, while street-names pop up in the bottom-right to help you navigate, and the mini-map shows possible shortcuts in light grey to give you a steer. Meanwhile, the other d-pad buttons control your tunes (nothing publicly confirmed yet, but we hear pop, rock and reggae), and the full GPS can be accessed at any time. You can't lay down routes for your mini-map as you could in GTA IV (half of Midnight Club's challenge is navigating on the fly), but you can zoom in and pan around to work out a route. Or, if you've just been to E3, to try and work out the way to your hotel. We're simple creatures.

The whole city's unlocked from the start, but as ever you enjoy it more as you drill down into it and learn its tricks and traps.

So simple, in fact, that when we're finally dragged off the road like a crying child to check out the customisation suite, we're quickly giddied by being able to put "EG 8/10" on the number-plate and blow up the rims until you can barely see the tyres. You can't stick your wife's face on the windscreen (unless you can draw her - and it probably won't go down as well as you think), but similar to Forza Motorsport 2 you can plaster the body in vinyls (custom or pre-designed), pick your colours from a Photoshop-style palette with the analogue stick, and save off your favourite designs.

All of which gives Midnight Club muscle in the fight for Christmas cash, but we'd be silly not to point out the V8 elephant already in the room: Criterion's Burnout Paradise launched on both consoles earlier this year, to huge acclaim, and continues to receive free content updates. Superficially there's a lot in common (you can even refill your nitrous in MCLA by driving through petrol station forecourts), and it'll be interesting to see how Rockstar approaches the online elements (about which relatively little is known, apart from the promise of Rockstar Social Club integration), but we suspect the differences between the two games will be more apparent than feature-list overlap suggests - Burnout emphasising crashes and chaining boosts while MCLA tightens your reactions until you're in the zone.

Either way, we've been told there's more to see - including the multiplayer, about which more soon, and of course motorbikes - so stick around for more reports on Midnight Club: Los Angeles prior to its not-so-distant 10th October release. Rest is for the weak anyway.