Midnight Club: Los Angeles Review

The city is the achievement. Los Angeles is rendered at a scale that lets you learn shortcuts properly, the day night cycle genuinely changes how you read a route, and the sense of speed at ground level is superb. Customisation runs deeper than its rivals attempted, down to individual body panels and a paint system with real range. What ruins it for a lot of players is the rubber banding: opponents are tethered to your position by an elastic that never quite lets go, so a perfect run is rewarded with a rival reappearing in your mirrors anyway, and the late races demand near flawless laps against an AI that is transparently cheating to stay close.

There is no story to speak of, just a ladder of names to beat. When it is working it is the best thing in its genre, and when the elastic snaps it is the most frustrating.