Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition (Xbox)

The gameplay at its core is simple; you drive around 3 big virtual cities over the course of the game, find illegal street races and enter them. You can also challenge other drivers and unlock various parts, bonuses and upgrades to your car – not to mention win new rides and so on. The more you do the club races, the more you earn the respect to advance and the story progresses – eventually you’ll be in the second city and third city racing for bigger and better prizes.

We’ve seen this kind of thing before in a dozen other games, so what’s different about it? Not much to be honest, if it’s not a broken formula, why should you fix it?

Rockstar did add a few Easter-eggs to be found in each city, in the shape of their trademarked spinning R logo, find them all and you’ll unlock some cool number plates.

So what did Rockstar do that added a new flavour to the game, if it’s just similar to other titles.

They added three special moves unlocked via Career Mode, we shall come to those later.

Now this might not sound like much but when you unlock them, by completing the key races they transform the whole experience into something a lot more – well – fun. Midnight Club 3 isn’t about looking pretty as you drive, it’s about flooring the gas and whipping onto two-wheels, it’s about slamming the nitrous until you leave the ramp and sailing gracefully through the air for about ten seconds (that’s a lot of airtime believe you me).

For those people that like to squeeze every ounce of performance out of their car, Rockstar have provided an in-game tuning feature that allows you to alter the drift, traction and understeering attributes of your car on the fly, so you can perfect the tune that suits you best.

The trick features of Midnight Club 3 in detail

If you’re like me and you don’t really care how many terra-pixel flip-mops you can get out of the graphics, and you just want to know why you should play the game then you’ve come to the right place, if you’re expecting a pixel-per-pixel comparison and waffle about the latest advances in game and console tech, this review isn’t for you.

If you care about cool gameplay features and tricks you can do with your cars, then you’ve come to the right place – since Rockstar have added big air moves and insane stunts galore to this game, enough to keep fans of The Fast and the Furious and Gone in Sixty Seconds happy.

Drifting: Just tap the button for the emergency brake and you’ll be able to slide around corners while oversteering in the direction you want to go, get it right and you’ll look good and babes will love you, well, the babes might not – but your mates are going to think you’re the daddy.