Midnight Club II, the obvious sequel to Midnight Club for PS2, immerses players in the world of underground street racing, complete with tricked-out cars, crazy opponents and pesky police patrols. Making things even more interesting is the option to take your racing online and challenge up to seven other players for some tire-screeching, import-racing action.

Being a racer at heart, Midnight Club II is a simple game to pick up and play. Within a few minutes of booting it up, you’ll be ripping up the streets with the best racers the AI has to offer. But that doesn’t mean your opponents are equally simple. The AI starts out easy enough, with good old Moses teaching you the ropes and taking it pretty easy on you, but after four or five races, you’ll be facing some of the toughest street racers around. As if trying to keep up with Hector and the other super-fast racers isn’t bad enough, you’ll frequently have to avoid police pursuit cars and helicopters. The cops can be just as ugly as the racers, smashing your car into a wall until you finally stop racing, or until you manage to lose them by blasting ahead at full speed.

The great thing about MCII’s gameplay is that every race is different, be it the racing style of your opponents or the actual format of the race. Some races are simple "get to the finish before everyone else does," while others challenge you to cross checkpoints in any order before everyone else, and still others need you to outrun the cops before you can even race. There are more than enough race types in this game, each of them enticing you to play it all the way to completion just to see what’s next.

Along with the wide variety of race formats is an AI that’s challenging and realistic. Early drivers are sloppy, speed-drunk fools who run into everything in sight in their quest to keep their engines redlined. Later racers are exactly the opposite, knowing the limits of their cars and just how much they can push those limits without becoming a smear on the pavement. The AI racers will never let up on you. Just when you think you’ve left one in the dust, he’ll suddenly find a shortcut and come leaping out of a parking garage right in front of you. While the AI obviously has the advantage of knowing all the shortcuts, it doesn’t seem to abuse this knowledge, leaving you feeling challenged, but not cheated, by the computer.

The environments in MCII are huge and well-mapped. When racing in downtown Los Angeles, you’ll feel as if you’re in the real city, with pedestrian malls, warehouses, parking garages and aqueducts strategically placed to enhance the realism while also providing some shortcuts through the streets. Paris and Tokyo get the same detailed treatment, leaving you with the feeling you’ve really been racing in those cities. During many of the races, you’ll be able to choose your route, which allows you to explore every nook and cranny looking for the best shortcuts and choke points in the city.

Midnight Club II stocks a nice inventory of around two dozen cars, all of which you’ll earn by winning races. After all, street racing is all about earning "pink slips," and I don’t mean lingerie. The cars, unfortunately, are not licensed, which leaves them looking a touch generic at times, especially the early vehicles. To compensate for this slight loss of realism, Rockstar made sure each car performs as it is spec’d out, so a junk car is going to handle like a tank, while some of the high-end street rockets have great acceleration but lousy grip. This variation in cars becomes more evident when you start racing online, as you’re sure to face every car available at one time or another. To spice things up, you can also race on motorbikes, which is incredibly realistic and likewise just as dangerous.

When it comes to vehicle physics, MCII should be held up as the model of how things should be done. Vehicles actually grip the pavement, and when the pavement’s wet, they slip and lose grip, just like a real car would. Even the slipping is properly done, meaning that a car won’t keep spinning off into the distance just because it hit a wet patch. Heck no, it’ll slip until it the driver either catches the spinout or the skid runs out of momentum. The handbrake in MC II functions like a real handbrake: slowing you down a bit while letting you ease the car into a power slide to handle a crazy turn. Your car can also take flight when launching off of a cliff or elevation, which forces you to keep the car balanced in the air so you don’t trash the suspension on touch down. You can even pull the car up onto two wheels to make it around insanely tight turns! It’s been too long since I’ve seen physics this good in a racer.

Rockstar spared no expense when it came to the gameplay offerings in MCII. There’s the obvious career mode, which plays like any other campaign, with you challenging other street racers for fame and the title to their cars. In fact, that’s how you unlock new cars in this game; you have to win them from your opponents. The better the car, the better the guy (or girl) driving it is, which means you’ll work your tail off trying to unlock some of the real high-end speed machines.

Along with career mode, you’ve got circuit mode (race lap-style on any unlocked course), multiplayer and cruise mode (freely explore any unlocked city without having to race anyone.) There’s also a race editor, which doesn’t allow you to create tracks but does allow you to set up checkpoints throughout the city to determine the course racers must follow. Lastly, there’s the online mode, which is excellent. It’s very easy to create or join a game, and lag is rarely evident except in full-on eight player races, where it can get ugly when racing players with lesser connections.

If there’s a weakness in the gameplay, it has to be the limited damage system, which only comes into play during police pursuits. Most of the time, you can run into walls or other vehicles and suffer little, if any, vehicle damage. Once the police are chasing you, though, every hit they deal to you does damage until you either escape or your car explodes from all the damage. The only other time you’ll notice serious damage effect when racing is when you run into a gas pump, which delivers an immediate and flaming death. I would have liked to have seen the damage model consistently applied throughout the game, especially considering the vehicle models aren’t licensed and thus don’t require Rockstar to jump through legal hoops to show damage.

Midnight Club II’s graphics don’t exactly push the PS2, that’s for certain. They look good, but that’s about it. The cities are nicely textured, but the vehicle models are just too generic. Particle effects, when there are any, are well done, as is the smoke that blasts out when cars spin their tires, but there’s really no "wow" factor to any of the game’s graphics. The graphics aren’t "poor" by any stretch of the imagination; they just don’t do justice to the game’s subject matter, which is flashy cars and exotic locales. The animation of vehicles in motion, however, is fantastic, and the frame rate is very consistent, rarely dropping below 30fps.

You’d better like hip-hop and techno, because that’s what you’re going to get an earful of in MCII. The soundtrack’s saving grace is that it can be changed during play, so you’re not stuck hearing that same thumping bass beat every time you retry a race.

The game sounds are better than those of most racers, with a striking amount of realism to be found in the vehicle sounds. Rockstar did a great job making a car sound like a car and a motorbike sound like a motorbike.

Voice acting, while a bit stereotypical at times (especially when it comes to the Hispanic racers) is decent, though the scripts can get old fast. There are only so many times you can stand to hear racers say "your car is a joke" before you turn the voice volume down to zero.

If you’re looking for a game you won’t be able to stop playing, this is it. With the mix of vehicles, environments and superb driver AI, you’ll be able to pick this game up months from now and find yourself playing through it all over again. You can switch up cars for every race (assuming you’ve unlocked them), and make it extra difficult by taking low-end cars up against high-end drivers. Don’t forget you’ve got the race editor, so you can custom build your own races, and you can always play multiplayer or online.

Overall

Midnight Club II is a title that sets the bar for all other racers to follow. Its combination of gameplay, physics, lush environments and strong AI make it the king of racers in my mind. If the graphics were a bit less jagged and the cars licensed, MC II would have scored even higher. The online component and racing editor ensure you'll keep coming back to this game time and again for pure racing enjoyment.