Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition review

Apparently, there’s a whole culture out there of people who like to customize things. They insist on trying to be individual and they do so not by making their own products or having them made-to-order, but by buying off-the-shelf products and adding little touches to make them stand out as their own. From picture-clad ring binders to bejeweled Apple iPods, you can tell where these people have been wherever you go.

However, nowhere is customisation of standard products more prevalent than in the auto world and Rockstar Games invites us back into this underground world for a third time with Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition.

Make it your own

Although the games have been around a little while and met with reasonable praise, this is the first time I’ve been treated to a “street” racer like this (“street” being used here in the “hip” sense, not in the Monaco sense). For those who don’t know, the world of Midnight Club exists after dark only.

Upon choosing your initial ride at the seediest local garage you’ll ever find, you’re dumped out on the roads of a living city to free-roam and find like-minded racers to challenge. Their locations are marked out your Sat Nav, just approach them, flash your lights and you’re off.

Breakdown

Races are broken into a couple of different types. You have point-to-point which may or may not involve checkpoints and circuits. As these are carried out in the free-roaming city area, you have a fair old leeway as to how to get to your goal.

You’ll always have to hit the right checkpoints but other than that, you can decide quite freely which bridge to go over, whether to go round the mall or through it (Blues Brother style, yeehaw) and even which street to take on some of the more open courses. Winning the race will get you some cash, which you can take back to the garage to either beef up your existing car or buy something new. Lather, rinse, repeat and that’s MC3 in a nutshell.

In the club

However, we all know things aren’t quite as simple as that. A lot of races are closed slub affairs, whereby you have to belong to a certain club to be able to race. This opens up the challenge of having to find the cash for an SUV or Luxury Sedan, which is hard work.

Some tournament style races will put up cars as prizes and considering the work needed to raise the appropriate cash reserves, this actually works out as a much easier when it comes to certain clubs. You’ll still be left with the task of kitting your prize out to race winning standards (you didn’t think they’d let you win top of the range, did you?) but at least you’ll be halfway there. As well as the clubs, you’ll come across open city races, specific recurring opponents and other such challenges.

The racing itself is an exhilarating affair. It’s fast, manic and covered in beautiful glitz and Street Hawk type light trails. The addition of slipstreaming, nitro boosts and aggro (temporary invulnerability) makes for frantic exciting races, much on a par with Burnout (although not as aggressive, natch). The free-roaming nature of the courses is a real treat for this reviewer and grants a welcome freedom rarely seen in arcade racers.

Go-faster stripes

Completely as an aside to the racing, there’s almost an entire sub-game involved in making your ride your own. As well as the traditional performance boosting upgrades, you can enhance your car just because you can. This upgrades range from Shaz + Gaz style windshield adornments right up to spinning wheel hubs, with everything in between. For someone like me, who only races from inside views, this is an almost pointless addition but it’s nice to have it, I suppose. As with other Xbox racers, the decent enough soundtrack can be improved upon by incorporating your own music as well.

Whilst multi-format releases converted to the Xbox usually smack of shortcuts galore, MC3 is lucky enough to appear to have avoided that particular roadblock. From the outset it looks gorgeous. There’s a little obvious jagginess to some of the car models but the races are so fast and the effects so furious that you’re unlikely to notice. I’ve encountered a tiny bit of frame chop in my play-time, but it was more than excusable given what was going on on-screen at the time, too.

Exhaust-ing

MC3 is a fantastic arcade racer, no doubt about it. It’s fast, exciting, challenging, nice to look at and simply fun to play. I honestly can’t find that much to complain about. So I won’t, other than to say that I feel the loading times could have been reduced. That’s about it. Really. Except something about it doesn’t quite hit the mark.

The handling. Contrary to the beautifully weighty handling model used in Burnout 3 and the drifty but controllable method employed by Outrun 2, Rockstar has opted for a feel of being constantly on rails and this detracts from the fun a little. It’s simply too easy to keep the car under control, and that feels a little (I know this is going to sound odd, given the genre) unrealistic. There’s no sense of momentum, no sense of being on the edge, being rewarded for smart control, no sense of soul.

It’s a solid, fun game and there’s no doubt you could do a lot worse, but you might find yourself feeling a little detached from it all after not too long.