Midnight Club: Hands-On

It's not often that you find a racing game with a back story, but Midnight Club attempts to do just that. It seems that there's a group of race fiends who meet in a warehouse then take to the busy streets of New York, Tokyo, and London for a night of illegal racing.

Midnight Club is being developed by Angel Studios, the same company behind Microsoft's PC racing game, Midtown Madness. So the extreme similarities between the two games isn't too surprising. Like Midtown Madness, Midnight Club puts you on some extremely crowded city streets and expects you to worm your way through traffic faster than the rest of the racers. You're given the opportunity to find your own path through the city, including various shortcuts and a rooftop-to-rooftop hop over a few buildings.

At this point, the game looks pretty nice, though it hasn't been optimized yet - so traffic doesn't get as bad as it should, and the game has a rough look to it graphically. That should all be cleaned up by the game's release date, which is currently scheduled for the oh-so-specific time frame of "this year."