L.A. Rush Review

L.A. Rush is Midway’s take on the street racing craze and while it certainly isn’t a bad game, it is far from great. The racing is decent if not uninspired, but the story mode is lame, there is no customization (isn’t customization 100% of the appeal in street racing ?), and no online play which all add up to mean L.A. Rush is light years behind the competition.

Story Mode

The main single player mode in L.A. Rush is a story mode that follows your character Trikz, a renowned L.A. street racer. A local race promoter by the name of Lidell, who is not a fan of yours, by the way, announces a major series of races. Since he doesn’t like you, he uses his connections to steal your cars so you will have a tough time winning his series. He does leave you with a low-end ride and you spend the rest of the game winning races, searching all over Los Angeles for your stolen cars, and heading to West Coast Customs to “pimp your ride”.

There are a couple of problems, though. First, races cost money to enter and if you get last place in a race you lost your entry fee. The AI doesn’t play fair, though, so you wreck a lot which means you have to run a lot of races multiple times. Money is a constant issue. Secondly, you are penalized in missions where you “find” your stolen cars by having to repair damage done to them while you are trying to get them back to your base. Again, money issues. Third, you never actually get to customize your car. You just drive to West Coast Customs and they do it for you.

Story mode is a bust, period. It would have almost been worth all of the trouble if you had at least been able to customize your car, but you can’t. Isn’t that the appeal of street racing, both in real life and in videogames, to be able to show off your unique and individual style? I’m still playing Need for Speed Underground 2 a year later just for the car customization, so for L.A. Rush to attempt to give you a similar experience but forget to include the most important aspect of the game is unforgivable. Instead we just drive to West Coast Customs, they tinker with it, the “Pimp My Ride” theme plays, and your car has a shiny new makeover without any input from you. Super lame!

Gameplay

Now, if the gameplay was good this wouldn’t have been such a huge problem, but that sadly isn’t the case. The driving itself is actually pretty decent. The controls are responsive, there is a decent sense of speed, and the cars feel just right. There are a couple of issues, however, that sour the experience. One issue is that you crash way too much. And every crash forces you to endure a little video of your car flipping out. If it was just once in a while, this would have been fine, but in Rush you crash a lot. The roads are packed with cars so it is very hard to avoid a collision. I crash more in Rush than I do in Burnout {and Burnout is a game that is literally nothing but car crashes} and the excessive period of time between crashing and then getting back to racing completely kills the pace and fun of the game. Also, the AI is apparently not affected by crash-itis the way human players are as computer controlled drivers seem to never wreck. Throw in the ever present army of police cars that constantly harass you and the experience is more aggravating than fun. I know, the solution to crashing too much is to “drive better”, but the story mode isn’t worth the effort so all of the problems just sort of snowball.

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