Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13139 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Rockstar Games
• Released on: 2003-06-20
• Rating: To Be Announced
• Platform: Xbox

Amazon.co.uk Review
Midnight Club II builds on the illegal street racing fun found in the original PS2 launch title Midnight Club and brings it to the Xbox. Like the original, it pits you against other drivers in non-linear street races in which you can earn new gear, new cars, and even new controls--you're a novice at the start, but by the end you're a pro who can land on all four wheels after a jump, expertly control a power slide turn and much more.

New in Midnight Club II are the presence of the police and the ability to drive a motorcycle. Much of the game consists of cruising around three large and well rendered cities: Paris, Tokyo and Los Angeles, following a red dot on a map. The dot is a rival racer; once you track and chase them down you flash your high beams and then you can race them. It's a clever way of giving you a warm up, keeping you immersed in the game and best of all, teaching you the layout of each city.

Racing is fun, fast and furious. This isn't a simulation, it's an arcade-style racer--but the physics system is internally consistent so it feels more realistic than it actually is. Rockstar has put a premium on keeping you in control, keeping the thrill-factor high, and giving you a heart-stopping sense of speed. The graphics are fantastic and the cities are incredibly detailed. As a counter-point the voice acting is just plain awful.

Midnight Club II offers a wide range of game modes, ensuring it will be playable for a long time to come: career, mission and a mode that lets you just jump into a race. Multi-player is possible in hot seat mode. All of this makes Midnight Club II a great addition to any video game racing fan's library. --Bob Andrews

Manufacturer's Description
Midnight Club II is all about unlimited freedom and fun in three separate living cities -- LA, Paris and Tokyo. Open city racing brings a whole new level of intensity compared with the staged, controlled environment of a track-based racer. You are part of an illegal underground racing circuit and are chased down by the cops at all times. They'll set up road blocks and chase you with helicopters. Do anything and everything to avoid capture and win the race.

Customer Reviews

rip through air with no speed ticket
Fans of racing games usually fall into two different camps: there are the ones who prefer extremely realistic racing simulations, and there are those who prefer a racing game that eschews the limitations of realism, and instead focus on delivering the most exciting, pulse-pounding racing experience possible. Dyed-in-the-wool fans of Sony’s best-selling Gran Turismo games will most likely cry foul at the unrealistic handling and ludicrous sense of speed in Rockstar Games’ Midnight Club II, but casual gamers will probably be too thrilled to care.

Midnight Club II is the latest from Rockstar Games, also known as the King Midas of the gaming industry. After garnering almost universal critical acclaim and selling over 8 million copies of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (that’s equivalent to a $400 million movie, by the way), outdoing itself is a nearly impossible task for the company. With MC2, instead of trying to make an overly ambitious game in an attempt to outdo Vice City in scope and innovation, Rockstar has instead developed a game that takes familiar game concepts and polishes them up to the point of near-excellence.

For those that are lost, MC2 focuses on the not-so-legal world of street racing. The atmosphere of the game seems to be more than a little influenced by The Fast and the Furious. Quite a few of the characters bear some resemblance to the archetypes from Furious, and the nighttime races seem to mimic the atmosphere of the movie. Thankfully, in MC2’s races the cars actually turn, and the computer-generated characters are considerably more lifelike than the wooden actors in Furious.

The most important element of the races in MC2 is speed. The sense of it is incredible. Other cars on the road, pedestrians, buildings, bridges, and whatever else pass by at a blistering pace. And that’s before you use the nitrous oxide boosters. Thankfully, slowdown isn’t an issue, as the game never sputters or hiccups when you hit the really high speeds.

The races themselves are highly enjoyable also. You get into a race by driving around the city and flashing your beams at another street racer. When the race starts, you and your opponents go on a mad dash through the city to try to go through all of the checkpoints first. Thankfully, the pristine control makes the madness easy to manage. Your thumb will for the most part be trained on the accelerator, and the handbrake is thankfully adjacent. Working nitro boosters, weight transfers, the horn, the beams, the brake, and the radio is easily done in the heat of a race, also.

Unfortunately, this game is a little too focused on making the races exhilarating. Although tearing through the city does indeed rule, the whole experience feels a little too dumbed down. Every car controls the exact same, there is no way to make any non-aesthetic modifications to the cars, and ripping up the streets feels easier than it should be. With a simple tap of the handbrake your car can handle pretty much any tight turn.

The races are very enjoyable, but the game’s difficulty level and the odd behavior of the computer-controlled enemies can mar the experience. Some of the races can become controller-breakingly difficult. It gets to the point that a perfect understanding of the shortcuts is required just to have a chance at winning. As for the enemy cars, they have an irritating tendency to kindly wait for you to catch up to them at the beginning of a race, and to ride your rear at the end. If you maintain a huge lead throughout the race but make a mistake at the end, you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose. On the other hand, you can liberally screw up at the beginning and have an equally high chance of winning. Flaws aside, Midnight Club II is almost ludicrously fun, but not quite worthy of the showroom

Who said speeding is a bad thing
The Xbox has a hell of a lot of racing games. Most of them are very well done thanks to the Xbox's graphics processing abilities but this has only lead to a glut of beautiful games that still don't do much to differentiate themselves from each other.

But that is about to change now that Rockstar Games have put together Midnight Club II as genuine high speed arcade racer with online capabilities (through Xbox Live). Midnight Club II is a solid arcade racer with one of the best single player arcade racing experiences to date and an online component that'll add plenty of longevity. Midnight Club II is the most complete arcade racer on the Xbox at the moment. It's the next generation answer for racing fans that have been waiting for a worthy successor to the fantastic Project Gotham Racing.

The racing in Midnight Club II is completely nonlinear it’s nothing like your simple point to point racing featured in other arcade racers. The races careen through three gorgeous cities: Los Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo. During a race it’s up to you to choose your own route, you are simply given the start and end finish points for the race on a map, the rest is up to you. So take as many shortcuts as you dare, cut corners, drive along the wrong side of the road just do whatever it takes to win the race, just make sure you also avoid all the unpredictable obstacles during the race including the police.

Midnight Club II manages to do the improbable; it stands out from the crowd of Xbox racers just make sure that you stick to racing on the console and not the streets.

rip through air with no speed ticket
The second addition to Rockstar's ''Midnight Club'' series lands on the X-Box and we should be very glad. First off this being a PS2 port might set some people off from this game but this game is actually great. Here's the breakdown:

GAMEPLAY: Fun and addicting. The checkpoint style races are great though the AI is very aggresive. Controls are dead on perfect, arcade feeling with nitro boosts, get on two wheels, weight transfer, and burning out off the line. There are plenty of game modes to keep you busy complete with a whole other set of races for you to complete in the Arcade section of the game in order for you to earn 100% in the game. The sense of speed is awesome in this game, also. Fast and furious anyone? You'll love it if you have X-Box LIVE, too.

GRAPHICS: It definately looks like a PS2 game but it certainly is very decent looking with fully modeled cites. The cars look good and the spark effects are excellent. It's pretty cool how the streets are filled with a number of oncoming cars too and the havoc you can cause on the sidewalks. Nothing to really complain about hear.

AUDIO: The big problem in this area is no custom soundtracks. This game needed it but the in game music gets the job done but come become repitative. The people screaming in the roads is nice and the engine roars are there, but nothing amazing.

REPLAY VALUE: The career mode you can say is kind of short but it will definately keep you racing and earning new cars for you to take on other racers on X-Box LIVE. The cruise mode is really good for just learning the cities shortcuts and such, the game holds its own here.

EXPERIENCE: Where else can you go flying down the streets in Los Angeles in hot looking street car that can do 0-60 in under 2 seconds? Then hit your nitro boost as you go flying off an inclined bridge over a river and land on the other side to take the flag? It's a pretty cool experience the way this game deals with racing, you'll love it trust me.

BOTTOM LINE: If you are looking for a solid racer on the X-BOX this game will do you good, especially if you have LIVE, one of the best racers on this console, now we'll have to wait and see if Midtown Madness 3 can stack up to the competition.

FINAL SCORE: 8 out of 10