Midnight Club: Los Angeles is the latest from Rockstar Games in their underground racing franchise. Sticking to the same formula as previous Midnight Club titles, players will explore an open city and compete in various types of races, earning street cred and winning prize money to upgrade and expand their garage full of vehicles.

While Midnight Club: LA is indeed an incremental step forward for the franchise, adding new design concepts and gameplay options, it doesn’t bring enough to the table to be a standout entry; it’s just another Midnight Club.

The game’s main focus is its career mode, which casts players as the newest young rookie to hit the Los Angeles street racing scene. Hooking up with a couple of key personalities, players discover that this game is all about locating opponents around the city, and accepting their race challenges. There are a number of different types of races; ordered (checkpoint), circuit (lap), red-light (race from a stop light to a landmark), and freeway races are the basic types, but can be set up as single runs or series, tournaments or time trials, and occasionally allow players to wager either cash or the pink slips to their beloved rides.

There is a fair amount of variety in Midnight Club: LA, but players still might find that the same process repeats itself for much of the game: race, race, race, earn, earn, earn, upgrade/buy car, repeat. The path is a long one, and there are many cars to purchase along the way. The fact that vehicles need to be unlocked is standard fare in today’s racing games, but in Midnight Club: LA the process is slow and arduous, leaving players with few vehicles right off the bat, and forcing them to conquer the career mode before graduating from a small selection of what you would expect to be the average teenagers’ first cars.

The franchise-standard and fully-licensed tuners, exotics, luxury cars, muscle cars, SUVs, and motorcycles make their returns in MC:LA, and each will allow players to make use of special techniques such as agro (smash through other cars), zone (slo-mo), and roar (clear a path through traffic). Clearly, the Midnight Club franchise has always been closer to the arcade end of the racing spectrum, and more for players who care about the cars and speed than actual race mechanics and realism.