Midnight Club II Review

By Kristan Reed Published 7 July, 2003

Xbox joins the club.

Version tested: Xbox

Midnight Club II is one of the fastest, most challenging and most addictive arcade racing games ever to appear on the PS2, with an extensive single player campaign backed up by a simple, but satisfying online mode. But as superb as the PS2 version undoubtedly was it harboured a few niggling elements that we were hoping the Xbox port would address; namely a lack of online voice comms (grrr), no online rankings, and visuals that were slightly rough around the edges.

Knowledge is power

'Midnight Club II' Screenshot 1

In terms of the gameplay features, the Xbox version is functionally identical; Career mode is the main meat of the game where you'll have to win a series of street based races in order to unlock progressively more powerful cars and bikes, Cruise allows you to familiarise yourself with each city, while Circuit Races is a more traditional Arcade flavour of lap based racing. Each set of races take place in a rough approximation of well known real life cities, with Los Angeles the home to the first set, followed by Paris, before climaxing in Tokyo.

In common with Rockstar's GTA series, intimate knowledge of each city is the key to success, with a multitude of underground and rooftop shortcuts available to the curious. The downside of these intricate cities is that it will take you ages before you're really able to take advantage of the 'knowledge', but once you do, it's an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Most races consist of heading for a series of checkpoints, some linear, some not, against a posse of predictably aggressive and cocksure street racers. In return for winning races, you either end up bagging a special move or their car/bike, which are just rewards for having to put up with their increasingly tiresome jibes about your lack of racing prowess. The numerous special moves help Midnight Club II distinguish itself from the pack, with in-air controls helping you transfer weight during enormous jumps, burnout allowing you to make a quick start, turbo letting you boost, two-wheel drive allowing you to squeeze though tight gaps, and slipstream turbo, as the name suggests, letting you draft past opponents at high velocity.

Stretchy AI

'Midnight Club II' Screenshot 2

The early races are a fairly straightforward introduction to the business of illegal street racing, but very quickly you hit an almost vertical learning curve, and it's not uncommon to find yourself having to repeat races upwards of ten or more attempts before you get lucky enough to win them.

Part of the problem is the AI. In some senses, the loose AI makes for a consistently enjoyable experience in that the leading pack rarely get so far ahead, and this system allows you to make dramatic comebacks, often stealing first place at the death. On the other hand, when you're doing exceptionally well, the CPU does too, so you'll often also get pipped at the post if you happen to make a mistake late on, despite perhaps achieving your best time by some margin. It's in no way realistic, but at least the game doesn't require you to make repeated restarts - there's always the sense that you can turn things around even if you happen to get off to a bad start.

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the entire package is that the entire single and multiplayer game is locked up tight until you achieve success in the Career mode. If you're considering purchasing Midnight Club II for some fast and frantic online thrills, bear in mind that by default you'll only have the very worst car available to you, along with only one of the three cities - Los Angeles. Although you will be able to check out the five different LA tracks, as well as the Detonate and CTF Battle modes, in order to get any real enjoyment out of this potentially excellent mode you're effectively forced to commit at least ten hours to the single player game, and it's hard to imagine why the designers thought this was a good idea.

Locked up inside

'Midnight Club II' Screenshot 3

Although we appreciate that Rockstar wanted to ensure gamers played the single player mode thoroughly, and got rewards for doing do, all it ends up doing is arbitrarily reducing the incentive to play online, and may explain why so few people are currently playing this online, and why so many are playing Midtown Madness 3, which does the opposite.

In MC2, the usual Quickmatch and Optimatch options are available for you to customise what mode you want to go for, but it's not all it could or should be. The interface, first of all, is as rudimentary as we've seen in a console online title, although setting up is nevertheless very quick and easy. Hosting our own session, however, proved utterly futile as there only seemed to be about 40 people in total actually playing across the entire world, and unless we dumbed down our settings to include lesser vehicles and base the race in Los Angeles no-one could join even if they wanted to.

Around a dozen or so matches were occurring in total, but were mainly CTF or Detonate matches, so our hopes of racing were limited to joining one of the very basic LA tracks. We hope the situation improves, because the potential is there for Midnight Club II to be an essential online game, but we suspect it might take a while before enough people have unlocked all the best bits before we see the servers filling up. If we ever do.

Be patient, young man

'Midnight Club II' Screenshot 4

If you're of the patient persuasion, then there's plenty of fun to be had with online multiplayer once you've committed every ounce of iron will and resolve to the cause of the enjoyable, but taxing single player game. Unlike the PS2 version, you can actually chat to your fellow racers (up to a maximum of eight) before, during and after a race, complete with the fantastically annoying voice masking (which very few people ever use, mercifully). Unfortunately though, once you've chosen your vehicle, there's no way of changing it unless you quit out of the race, potentially losing your place in the session.

As fast and frantic as the PS2 original was, it was easy to see that Rockstar had to make several compromises to keep the game's frame rate solid, and compared to Burnout 2, for example, the visuals just weren't in the same league. The Xbox version is still nowhere near benchmark level, but it's easy to appreciate the improvements, with a higher resolution, better particle effects and superior texturing contributing to a much cleaner looking game. The scenery, in particular, is noticeably less 'foggy' making the game quite a bit easier to play in some of the more frantic areas, as you've got an appreciably greater amount of time to react to your surroundings. Previously we'd continually crash into walls in the darker areas while we attempted shortcuts, but the Xbox version solves all that. Mercy.

On the other hand, as the air is no longer filled with the sound of our crumpling metal death, we're left wondering why Rockstar hasn't taken advantage of the Xbox hard disk and included custom soundtracks, as the selection of tunes we can now hear gets immensely annoying at times.

Final straight

Midnight Club II is undoubtedly a fine game, and is the better of the two versions by virtue of a smattering of extras. But unlike the PS2, Xbox owners have already got a fair selection of top notch online racing games to choose from and many will prefer Midtown Madness 3's approach - particularly as it has been designed from the ground up for the Xbox. Regardless, Midnight Club II is a decent port and has enough going for it in its own right to be considered a worthy purchase, just maybe not an essential one.

8 / 10

Read the Eurogamer.net scoring policy
Picture of Kristan.

About Kristan Reed

Kristan is a former editor of Eurogamer, dad, Stone Roses bore and Norwich City supporter who sometimes mutters optimistically about Team Silent getting back together.

Read more articles from Kristan by visiting the Kristan Reed archive page.

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Comments (23) Latest comment 9 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • ssuellid #1 9 years ago

    Nice review sums it up very nicely.

  • Wretched Chin #2 9 years ago

    I'm guilty of MC2 bashing while playing Midtown recently, but it really is quite good, if a little too difficult for my liking.

    I'd like to play this more online but it's true what Kritan says about the lack of players: it seems pretty dead out there so it's Midtown Madness for preference in this uncertain world!

  • Rusta #3 9 years ago

    Good game, can be annoying at times, but a good laugh whislt playing with friends. (1 player mode only, I don't have Live as yet)

    The motorbike is fantastic, really fast and great body shifting movement controls.

    Buy it if you like racing games, and fast hold your breath fun!

  • pjmaybe #4 9 years ago

    Hmmm, the comments about live play being locked down by the singleplayer mode, that makes sense...if only Rockstar had made the single player mode a bit easier, they might've got more of a following but I'm ploughing my way through the LA city at the moment and I think I'm going to be stuck here for some time, frustrating when I was actually looking forward to comparing MCII's take on Paris to MM3's!

    Peej

  • krudster #5 9 years ago

    If you want some guide on time, it took me about 4 hours to get past LA, and that was having completed it before on PS2....it's a toughie.

  • pjmaybe #6 9 years ago

    Yelp!

    I've only got one more person to "meet" in cruise mode on LA. I'm seriously hoping that means that I only have to win a couple more races as it's taken me AEONS of play to get that far.

    Peej

  • tiddles #7 9 years ago

    I love this game, but judging from various responses it's definitely an acquired taste.

    It's rock hard, and often pretty frustrating - the first skill you'll master is the "pause-restart-skip cinematic" combo, as four out of five times you'll be put out of contention during the early stages of a race.

    But it's a meaty challenge, and whenever you do finally win a race, it's a huge kick. Give it a try if you found Burnout 2 pretty but too easy, but be warned you'll need to unlock some of the faster vehicles before the fun really starts.

    (This refers to the single player only - I've not been online with it yet.)

  • tiddles #8 9 years ago

    Bad news, Peej - after you meet the last racer, you still have to win a "pan-city" race championship - usually consisting of series of bastard hard races....

  • pjmaybe #9 9 years ago

    (In sad dejected voice)

    woo and indeed hoo

    Peej

  • APR #10 9 years ago

    the first skill you'll master is the "pause-restart-skip cinematic" combo

    Yep, used that one ALOT. This game is very difficult, especially on Paris and Tokyo.
    And a VERY annoying aspect is the traffic, as often a car will deliberatly drive in to you as you go past, turn head on into you as you approach opposite traffic, or stop dead in front of you as you go past a cross junction.
    Can be more frustrating than your 'opponents'.

  • krudster #11 9 years ago

    and the fact that the traffic is semi random is as good as it is bad. Good in that it can act to trip up your opponent, but bad in that you can never suss out what to avoid and when. How many times did I mess up at the death thanks to one of those psycho cars turning across me? Lots.

  • Machiavel #12 9 years ago

    Hmm, I'm not a great racing bod. Think this might break me. Shame :(

  • Mugwum Verified Operations Director, Eurogamer Network #13 9 years ago

    Well, Kristan sucks and he made it through, so there's probably hope for you.

    Rupert is pretty good at MC2 though, as I'm sure he'll tell you all at some point...

  • Machiavel #14 9 years ago

    Hmm. Now I'm tempted to find my standing on the ladder of sucksville.

  • caligari #15 9 years ago

    Maybe I didn’t give this game enough time…but after a weekend’s worth of play, all I can say is “Meow”? This game is awful…from the handling to the in game graphics…from the cut scenes to the hideous hip hop soundtrack. Maybe I’ve been spoilt by similar games such as Vice City and Burnout 2, but people…this game is a real case of ‘try before you buy’. Okay, so my rant has no point, but I felt compelled to write SOMETHING for once, as I usually agree wholeheartedly with ol’ Eurogamer’s scores.

  • pjmaybe #16 9 years ago

    Am on the last race of LA at the moment, having not had that much time to play it...

    The bikes are great to control but useless in a race because you will just fall off (or more likely end up splattered all over the front of some traffic) again and again and again. So far I've managed to complete nearly every race with the wanky old 70's hot rod thing...!

    Straight checkpoint races (where everyone's following more or less the same route) aren't too bad, it's the ones where you choose your own path that bug (and the checkpoints are scattered pretty randomly)

    Time and time again I'm having to restart, through clipping a piece of scenery, or having some asshole NPC pull out of a side road and sideswipe me...ARGH!

    As much as I don't think this is the greatest driving game in the world, it's keeping me playing (maybe because I want to see what the next city is like) but to soothe my fevered brow I booted Vice City up again last night, and that seems almost placid in comparison (sure, they're completely different types of game, but hey...any port in a storm!)

    Peej

  • KomboBreaker #17 9 years ago

    A nice game and a nice review but I personally prefer the PS2 version. Those XBOX frame rate problems really bother me. Anyway, way to go Kristan Reed!

    CYA!

  • CyberClaw #18 9 years ago

    I usually don't care for this, but I bought this game for the online component. So here is a trick for you who want to finish the SP fast and easy:
    Go to options, go to cheats. type "howhardcanitbe0". The Enemies, instead of adapting, will allways race on their dumbest setting. If you want to have hard enemies put 9 instead of 0.
    The only real chalanges then, are the time chalanges, when racing another enemy without time limit, you'll be able to win easy.

  • BradlayLaw #19 9 years ago

    I can't play with the cars anymore. Bike all the way.

  • spiny #20 9 years ago

    From gamefaqs:

    Go to Options, then Codes.

    Type: ''howhardcanitbe'' then add any number from 0-9. 0 being the easiest, 9 being the hardest

  • IdleHands #21 9 years ago

    Another way to skip the Race intro is tap the Camera button (X) on Xbox, this usually works without changing your view.
    The secret to avoiding traffic is to assume they will likely turn into side roads, so drive on the outside of them (centre of road) rather than be tempted to go for a gap that wont be there :-)
    Also when in the lead, clip busses etc. so they spin in front of your opponents.
    Bikes are an aqquired taste and you only have to use them for one race in LA, you can go back to cars after that. Best played in 'hanging over the wheel' first person camera, you can slip through impossibly small gaps in traffic, but some peeps may need to swap to 3rd person cameras when they crash, so they can see where they are heading if you get dissorientated. Bikes are just loopy in CTF games!

    Tiddles, Peej doesn't have to to the Circuit races until he's raced all of Toyko. He's only got to beat Dice in LA. Hard, but fair :-)


  • Rusta #22 9 years ago

    You dont have to race on a bike, you can change to any car you want and race against the bikes - worked for me, I'm on paris now - I found it a lot easier with a friend navigating for me.

  • pjmaybe #23 9 years ago

    "You dont have to race on a bike, you can change to any car you want and race against the bikes - worked for me, I'm on paris now - I found it a lot easier with a friend navigating for me. "

    Finally got onto Paris. Bloody tough couple of races but gets easier (love some of the rooftop ramps and stuff!) - So far though, I'm still chugging through this game with the 71 hotrod...bikes are OK, nice and fast, but you're just too easy to knock off...

    This is getting much more play than Midtown Madness III, simply because of the speed and the fact that it's a lot less cheesy!

    Peej