Midnight Club II

Midnight Club II is an arcade racing game that immerses you to the dark underworld of illegal street racing. The game sees you start out your career racing through the streets of Los Angeles, Paris, and eventually Tokyo, Japan. You find yourself entering this notorious racing scene, a scene with no rules and no set routes. Since there are no set tracks, part of the challenge is finding the fastest route through the cities. Use whatever routes, shortcuts and driving methods necessary to hit the checkpoints and arrive at the finish line before your opponent has a chance. Winner takes the title to the loser's car. Luckily this is a game and you can hit the retry button.

Midnight Club II features a reasonably lengthy single-player career mode (you have to play this to unlock new cars and tracks which are locked in other modes), an arcade battle modes (you can only access cars, races, and cities that you've opened up in the career mode), and an addictive multiplayer mode (LAN/Internet) for up 8 players, which let you play in either a standard sort of capture the flag game or a bomb-oriented variant called detonate. There are 28 cars for you to choose from (muscle cars, hot rods, rally cars end even motorcycles), all of which you'll earn by winning races. The cars, unfortunately, are not licensed, which leaves them looking a touch generic at times, especially the early vehicles. Fortunately there are also plenty of fictional ones on offer and each handles very differently. All of the cars here are designed for high-speed action, so there are come with a limited supply of nitrous oxide for a short boost of rocket-like speed, which can also be gained by drafting behind other racers and then speeding around them. The vehicles handle well, there is a handbrake, burnouts, weight shifting, and nitrous. The controls are responsive, and the general arrangement (gas, brake, nitrous) feels quite natural, the cars feel solid and handle like they have actual mass and weight (of course in terms of arcade gameplay).

Although the single-player missions are a lot of fun, they become extremely tough soon. So that you will have to replay a race several times before finding the right path to first place. This may lead to some frustrating moments of repeating a course several times until your skill becomes greater than those around you, but as you become familiar with each city, you will find that the "impossible" may actually be easier than you think with the help of some well placed shortcuts. Handling for the cars (and motorcycles) in Midnight Club II is well done. The controls, either the keyboard or the wheel, are crisp and respond as they should. Using a steering wheel with the game increases the gameplay further, although it's quite good playable with keyboard too.

Overall, Midnight Club II is one of the best racing game I've played in months.If you're looking for a new arcade racing game for your game collection you should definitely consider picking up Midnight Club II. ($40). Download playable demo (168MB).