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After Angel Studios celebrated the launch of the PS2 with the street-racing game Midnight Club, they continued both their development of arcade racers and their collaboration with Rockstar Games over the course of the next few years, leading up to their acquisition and eventual transition to Rockstar San Diego. Their first work as a proper Rockstar studio would be cut from the same cloth as their debut collaboration—a sequel to Midnight Club in 2002.

With five more racers under their belt since the first, you would expect—or at least hope—for that experience to be reflected in their newest title and represent a significant improvement in what was a conceptually interesting but otherwise incredibly poor series debut. Midnight Club II does, at least, improve on some of its predecessor's elements. There are measurable improvements here. Not nearly enough, though; MCII is often taking 2 steps forward and 1.9 steps back.

The good things first; one of the original game's worst features (and that's saying something) was the completely absurd physics system. That is addressed in Midnight Club II, at least in regards to driving and handling. The game still relies on a fundamental devotion to the handbrake, but if you manage to find some open areas or less busy streets to drive around in, you'll notice that your control over the car has improved by an order of magnitude. The events also significantly lean more into the "arcade" aspect of the arcade racer; as a result, getting so much air off a ramp that you clear the River Seine and land directly in the Denon wing of the Louvre is a relatively common occurrence.

The spectacle is certainly ratcheted up to 11 here. There are also a lot of things that would qualify as improvements if, you know, the actual game was better...it's significantly longer than the one before it, and it has a decent amount of extra mechanics, but longer doesn't necessarily mean better, and outside of the slip-stream turbo, the rest of MCII's introductions feel like pretty shoddy additions. Really, who wants to race a motorcycle in a street racing game?

Anyway, what it all comes down to is this: is the actual racing fun? And the answer to that question is a resounding "not really." It can be! But it usually isn't. Let's head this off at the pass; sure, this is a street racing game, and that usually is defined by weaving through traffic-laden streets and trying to avoid your fellow drivers. But the collision system of Midnight Club II is, as with its previous entry, god-awful and makes any contact with anything akin to rolling a die and applying a random effect. Flying into an intersection at 140 mph and t-boning some tractor-trailer?

No problem, on your way! Having your passenger-side mirror tap against a light post? You better have a living will and testament. And this is amplified by the erratic nature of both your competitors and NPCs. Driving into oncoming traffic is a factor of many races, so you'll be delighted to find out that cars will often swerve to hit you directly. U-turns in the middle of a highway? No problem. And then of course there are the blind intersections where you just have to hope no car happens to be crossing at the same time as you.

Your fellow racers make for even worse nuisances. Right off the bat, in any race where you start within close proximity of others, you'll be restarting the race within a few seconds about half the time, due to the propensity of rival AI to crash into you, box you out of a turn, or just sacrifice their own race to put you into a wall. Midnight Club II can be incredibly chaotic, and while that has the chance to help you out, it much more often is to your detriment.

Winning races—particularly towards the endgame—doesn't even feel like an accomplishment of your driving skill as much as it does a test of RNG. You could spend a lot of time attempting the same race over and over, only for your eventual winning run to have you clearing your opponents by seven or eight seconds. There is no consistency in the challenge here; it's just frustration and chaos for the sake of it, and you just have to ride it out until the chaos works in your favor.

Which it does, admittedly. But with an average of six opponent racers and just one of you, the odds aren't in your favor. No race ever truly feels truly won; you'll notice that cars far behind or in front of you start making a lot fewer mistakes, as the game doesn't render traffic outside of your field of view. In multiplayer, at least, that chaos can be pretty amusing to witness. On exceptionally rare occasions, it's funny in single-player mode, too. There's enough here to definitively call Midnight Club II an improvement on its predecessor. But the bar was underground; it needed far grander steps to turn into something of quality. With this level of incremental improvement, a quality Midnight Club title still feels half a dozen titles away.

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