LA Rush Review

Review Platform: Xbox

LA Rush is another franchise game trying to cash in on the street racing genre. It fails to meet standards in story, gameplay, and weirdly enough, actual racing. While the graphics are decent, it may not be enough to hold your interest.

In Rush, you play an awesome street racer named Trikz who has amassed a swanky mansion, tons of street rods (called Whips), and super-hot pixel babes.

The game starts off like some hip-hop video as you throw a party to bring all the street racers to celebrate a race promoter’s current event: a series of races through Los Angeles to determine who is the ultimate whip racer.

See, I can throw around the lingo too.

At the party, Lidel (the race promoter) shows up to throw his weight around and trash talk Trikz. But Trikz has none of it and flirts with Lidel’s girlfriend. Of course, the male ego gets in the way and the next day Lidel uses all of his contacts to steal Trikz’s cars and junk the mansion, leaving your hip-hop whip racer with nothing but the very first car he tricked out that started his rise to underground stardom.

Now you must find your cars while reestablishing your cred'. With the help of your friend Ty, who calls you from time to time with the location of a car, you seek out races to earn money in order to find another race to enter. Ty (with Lidel’s girlfriend) finds the cars for you, so all you really have to do is drive to the car and get it. When you do, a chase ensues and your goal then is to speed back to your garage for safety.

To further the story, you are sometimes treated to a quick cut-scene whenever you enter a new part of town, or when certain rivals get wind of your quest. Unfortunately, that’s all you do. Find a race, pay the entrance fee and try to place so you’ll make a profit. Then find another race, to do it all again. Oh, and to break up the action, you have to find your cars. If you get bored, you can get on over to West Coast custom to trick out your car, but you don’t have control over what’s being done. West Coast does it all for you.

The story is laughable, and the voice-overs and character acting is even funnier. Your actual quest has lots of potential, but racing is where the gameplay was concentrated. I understand, but the racing wasn’t fun and hardly developed the storyline at all.

Racing and/or driving through L.A., in the newest LA Rush franchise game is the best part. You can visit Mulholland, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and West Hollywood. The city is open-ended, so you can drive anywhere, anytime. Midway did a nice job scaling the city and laying it out well. One thing I absolutely loved was the traffic. There were plenty of cars to avoid while driving or racing and they followed the traffic lights to a tee. Lights changed in pattern, cars used signals, and traffic backed up when there was an accident. In the beginning, I spent an ample amount of time getting to know the city and I had fun just Sunday driving around.

Car models were accurate, but don’t expect a lot of recognizable makes and models. Midway included damage…as basic as it was. If someone hit your in the rear, a taillight went out. If someone hit you in the side, your corners angled up. It really didn’t affect your driving, so showing the damage was useless.

So you find a race, which is indicated by icons on your radar, and enter. There’s three others besides you. When the countdown ends, you sprint off, trying to find the next checkpoint. Luckily they’re on your radar and the checkpoints are shown and rise into the air like columns of lights on the actual street.

There is no one way to get to the checkpoints, though there is a certain basic route you must take if your doing the lap thing. Be careful, you may hit some traffic. When this happens, you are treated to an objective view of your crash. The cars literally burst into a hundred pieces in slow motion. The first few times, this is cool, but it seems that traffic is against you and moves into your line just to make you crash. And after about 30 minutes of crashes, I got annoyed by this feature.

The races are tough, even in the beginning. You’ll win money unless you place last and the A.I. of the other cars seemed dead on: they know the right way to go, the tightest line to turn, and the safest path in the middle of traffic. It only takes one or two major crashes to find yourself far back and hard-pressed to catch up. My biggest advice is to not go all out on the accelerator and stay with the flow of traffic. Also, stay in second and watch the first place racer and see what he (or she) does on the first lap.

I was disappointed that the analog stick was only used to control your car in LA Rush. I’ve lived on the digital pad for racers since I started gaming (see my other racing reviews). Also the default buttons A and X accelerated and braked respectively. Ninety-nine percent of racers on the Xbox use the L and R shoulder buttons to do this.

Fortunately, controlling the cars is decent. You may lose control of your cars once in a while, but you can weave in and out of traffic with ease and take corners with big drifts.

The realism in the sense of speed was nailed down. As you gain speed, the background comes at you at a good rate and the trees and other cars whiz by convincingly. If you’re going 30 MPH, then it feels and looks like you are going 30 MPH. The only exception was when I used the nitro option. I used it sparingly because there were hardly an practical stretches of street and you had no control on when it stopped. When you hit the nitro button, you used the full canister. This made taking corners difficult because distance was slightly distorted.

The sound effects in LA Rush were excellent. Cars revved like they’re supposed to, people screamed at you when you tried to run them over, and the wind whistled by you at high speeds.

The music was a mixed of hip-hop, techno, and rock, but nothing stood out. Most of the music really didn’t fit so, I turned it off. Dialogue was stiff and the pedestrians only said the same few phrases, as did the cops.

Fans of the LA Rush series will like the game better then I did. The storyline potential and realistic scale of L.A. were marred by the okay graphics, stilted plot, cookie-cutter characters, and laughable dialogue. Oh, and no online play on either console version. That’s just wrong.

Know what else is wrong? No chance of seeing Britney Spears in Hollywood and running her over. Wait, I’d keep her in the game to raise the standards of the acting.

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