Midnight Club: LA features amazing in-depth customization, loads of cars, and a beautiful city. If only it was raceable.
User Rating: 8.5 | Midnight Club: Los Angeles X360
Back on the PS2, I was always an NFS guy. Then as the quality of those games kept going down on the current-gen consoles, I looked to MCLA for my car tuning fix. And I have to say it delivered, in that aspect anyway. There are so many different ways to customize your car, while there are the standard options for body parts (though players of the older MC games may feel like they've downgraded), but the real improvement comes in the Vinyl editor, where there are hundreds of shapes and patterns you can mix and match to create anything from a race car, to a classic muscle, and everything in between. Unfortunately some people online use this to make cars featuring racial slurs and grotesque replicas of the human anatomy, if you know what I mean. Now the car customization is probably the only thing that keeps me playing the game today. I love making cars and sharing them with my friends online, however when I actually take my cars out to race it's a whole different experience. Racing is a total grind, and you'll lose count of how many times you have to re-start the races, and not because of a photo finish either. If you crash once you may as well just re-start because the insane rubber banding AI will be ahead of you in seconds. When you wreck your car, you aren't spawned back onto the road like most games, but instead your car spins in circles for a few seconds until it faces the other way, and you have to try and make a 5 point turn while your opponents fly by you. All this time your character is screaming "no,no,no!", making you want to throw your controller through the screen. Which brings me to the next issue of the game, the characters. The voice acting is terrible. Rockstar generally presents a funny spin on pop culture with their GTA games, but everyone in this game just sounds like a tool. Every couple of minutes during a race an opponent will call you to say something such as "yo homes I thought you were a good racer, but I guess not. You suck homes." Or when you ram the guy's car "heeeyy homee, watch my ride". I did manage to complete the whole career so you might be able to salvage some merit from the gameplay, but overall, if you love customizing cars, MC:LA is the game for you. If you want to race, there are plenty of other games out there. 
