I picked the game up yesterday, feeling the need to wash the bad taste of
Race Pro out of my mouth. When this came out it was in the middle of the Fallout 3/CoD:WaW crush and so got pretty much ignored. Additionally, I'm always leery of street racing games because it's so easy to screw up the format.
I can happily attest that after about five hours of play I'm having a lot of fun. I never played it before the patch, but I'm doing fine at the easier of the four levels of opponents (green, yellow, orange, red) and can even challenge decently at the higher levels. I have the reactions of a dead otter, but since I'm a fan of the GTA games my street racing "skillz" aren't too bad. MCLA does an excellent job of allowing some breakneck speed through a whole city (well, a miniature city) of obstacles. I didn't see this mentioned in the reviews I read, but when you hit light poles and trees, you tend to glance off, losing some speed but staying intact. This is true of a lot of other objects as well.
What is also fun, and this surprised me as well, is that I'm enjoying the customization of my car. Yup, five hours in and I'm still tinkering with my VW Scirocco. I've got all the performance upgrades added, but now I'm tweaking the paint, the rims, hell even the size and profiles of the tires. Cool.
UPDATE: Hey, how do you take photos in-game to put in your photo album?
