Plonking myself down onto the very generously sized sofa inside the media room of Rockstar Games' Sydney office, it wasn't long before I was being pummelled with some key facts surrounding Midnight Club LA and its predecessors. Fact One: Freedom – there's plenty of it. An open world giving players huge areas to race within - and in between checkpoints, cruise the streets to your heart's content. Fact Two: The original Midnight Club sold 2 million worldwide. Midnight Club 2 sold 3 million. Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition presently stands at 5.5 million with sales continuing. Fact Three: The Midnight Club series were the first to introduce the open-city illegal street racing concept while managing to remain consistent with that philosophy through each iteration.

The goal for this next-gen addition was to make the most visceral, fast-paced illegal street racing experience possible within an open world. With the caveat that what I was about to witness was early code, with most elements yet to receive a whole heap of tweaking while other aspects not even yet implemented, it was time to turn on the pleasingly large LCD screen, crank up the amp and start racing.

The very first scene is of a highly detailed top-down view of a portion of LA. Imagine a Google satellite map set around the 200m mark and you'll be close. In a visual trick that had my man nipples tingling with excitement, the camera suddenly dropped in a headlong rush towards the ground, finally planting itself seamlessly behind the car. When I say seamlessly, I mean just that. Two seconds and with a low grumble from the sub-woofer, you're behind the car ready to cruise about the town. The car in question is a Mitsubishi 3000 GT, a classic tuner type muscle car with all the tight angles and menacingly impressive lines fit for the wide streets of LA. Up close, it's excruciatingly beautiful. Almost to my embarrassment I found myself reaching out, wanting to let my hands glide over its pearlescent exterior, delicately grasp its handle then enter its invitingly plush and warm interior. Focusing back to the moment, each one of these highly reflective monsters, while clocking in at over 100k polygons per car, receive a nice dose of style by the game's continuing association with Dub magazine, a popular and influential rag on automotive styles since 2000.

It's worth pointing out the level of authenticity of the game's locations, with many of LA's more famous landmarks such as The House of Blues and Miyagi's making an appearance. While not a clinical representation of the entire city, I was assured that for those having previously visited the city or having watched the endless amount of movies using LA as the backdrop (West Hollywood to be exact), cruising past the odd key location will help navigating through the large expanse. While on the topic of LA, the mix of narrow but mostly wide streets makes the perfect setting for the game's premise of illegal racing, and it's worth noting the map size for this release will be bigger than all three of the previous games combined. Yes, big is in fact best.

For once, the term 'seamless' isn't just some catchy phrase cooked up in PR's wet fantasy, it actually stands for a fluid, interruption-free experience. As was plainly evident by the unfolding demonstration, it's about minimizing the fuss versus maximizing the racing. In fact, that seems the fundamental aspect to the game: case in point being the initial stages of setting up a race. From the overhead map to finding yourself behind the steering wheel, it can be a matter of mere moments before you spot the 'hook car', a specific vehicle at which you'll need to flash your high beam to start the racing cycle. With a very obvious smoking coloured flare rising in the near distance and a yellow indicator also showing the direction, you speed towards it (which itself seems like a mini race), where starts the race proper. Once the race ends, you're quickly shown any cash and reputation points gained then it's right back to the cruising. No load times, no series of menus stopping play between modes at all; smooth and painless.

Besides the fact that it's a pleasing pastime (more on actually how very pleasing it is in a moment) racing has its rewards. The more reputation points you gain from races, the more races will be unlocked. The entire map, large as it is, is free to be explored straight from the beginning, so I'm assuming simply wandering the vast network of streets will easily chew up a few hours. In consistent fashion within the genre, the better your accomplishments, the better your rewards which in this case translates to greater purchasing power. Unlike the previous titles though, winning each race isn't as vital, with the amount of rep points gained determined by the difficulty as well as the final placing in the race. Rep points accrued determine how the game unlocks itself. Whether that means better cars or multiple levels of car accessories, that remains to be seen as Rockstar remains tight-lipped about certain subjects.

It seems two words nicely frame the experience of Midnight Club LA: seamless and visceral. Enough with seamless, let's do visceral. One of its meanings is "an experience characterized by or dealing with coarse or base emotions". Besides the fact that I wanted to head slap the Rockstar guys for stealing all the playtime (how's that for a base emotion), sitting back and watching the screen square on was quite sensational and in one sense perfectly captured the game's promise: the mindlessly perfect racing game.

Watching the game being played was a riveting experience in itself, helped in no small part by the very impressive audio/visual setup. Sound-wise the game's a thunderous cacophony of low bass notes shaking the internals better than any chicken vindaloo could ever hope to achieve, packed with screaming red-lined engines, plenty of high end shrills from grinding metal impacting with a host of objects to the sound of stressed tires chewing up the asphalt in all manner of wicked ways.

In terms of destructibility, apart from the seemingly indestructible buildings (a shame considering how much fun crashing into a famous landmark such as Miyagi's would be) everything else seems willing to collapse under a spray of sparks while your car seems immune to normal levels of damage. The amounts of damage I saw would normally result in a steaming, twisted wreck with car and human fluids dripping slowly onto the hot LA asphalt, but there's nothing more than a twisted frame and the odd scratch. While this may make a few racing aficionados twitch in their sleep in horror, it's just another mechanism by which players will spend more time racing rather than repairing. This ideology is realized by a unique repair system called 'Quickfix'. Hit a garage, press one button and its all fixed. Mind you, that nice exterior is now ruined with undecorated panels.

Visually, it's what I imagine a kick to the head would feel like, followed by a solid twist of the scrotum, capped off with copious amounts of booze to dull the constant throbbing. Powered by the RAGE engine (Rockstar Advanced Game Engine) which is in fact the same one used within GTA IV, it's hard not to be mesmerized by the insane amount of detail being pumped out of the screen. Attention to detail comes in small but beautifully crafted parcels. Panning the camera around to watch the driver being viciously jolted within his seat was more fun than I'd previously thought possible. Even activating the nitrous and watching the visual representation of the massive g-forces being piled onto the driver with the vision slowly narrowing into darkness was equally as impressive. Perhaps just as thrilling was seeing a super-cool yellow Lamborghini Gallardo clip another car while rocketing around a wide corner, resulting in what was obviously a nod to Hollywood-style stunts with the car spinning a few times in the air, parts flying in all directions before finally coming to a screeching rest on its roof. I also need to mention the first person view as shown by the game's very sexy new camera angles. Within the cockpit view, everything moves accordingly – arms swinging the wheels and shifting gears, dashboard filled with moving dials and everything outside moving with uncomfortable solidity and intensity. Beautiful stuff.

Midnight Club LA appears to be the evolutionary pinnacle of the series, drawing together all of the tried and tested elements that made the past titles so successful, adding in newer next-gen features that other titles will find hard pressed to match, certainly within 2008. And who better to offer what easily looks like a genre-defining racing title than the originators of the concept. With the amount of confidence oozing out of Rockstar, they know they have a winner and it's their intention that as many others know it too. This is definitely one title to watch out for.