Impressive, any arcade racing fan will love it.
I missed the good ol' days on the PS2 where EA actually managed to make great racing games. Underground, Underground 2, Most Wanted, and Carbon.
So, if you own a seventh generation console, the closest you'll ever get to those legendary four NFS titles are Midnight Club: LA. And you better like it! Actually, you will like it.
If you've played those four NFS titles, you might find this a tad too arcadey, but it's the closest we can get, so enjoy it. Punk.
Career mode has you race races until you can challenge the champ of each type of vehicle (Luxury Champ, Muscle Champ, Tuner Champ, etc.) and finally the City Champ.
Difficulty is a bit tough, but fortunately, each race has a color indicator indicating it's difficulty. So you can play through campaign mode just reaping the small benefits from easy races, or take chances with the super hard races and blow through the campaign in a couple hours (hypothetically, of course, because we all know you're not THAT good).
You get around 45 cars, all customizable. You get some pretty easy ways to upgrade your performance, but the visual customization is where your car gets unique. You get a Photoshop-like vinyl editor to mix and match vinyls any way you want. Some people made Mario replicas, others South Park.
And you get a Rate My Ride option, where you get to put ONLY ONE of your cars out onto the marketplace for people to rate and buy. My personal Lancer got within the top 2000, and that's pretty darn good.
Multiplayer is just like GTAIV, except revolving around cars. You have a Cruise mode, where you and 15 other racers cruise around L.A. for fun. You can suggest a race, where people who want to play join in and can participate in your home made race. Or, you can select some of the other odd modes (like CTF) and play those. You also get a custom racetrack editor, where you can place your checkpoint markers anywhere that's within reach of vehicles, effectively creating your own racetrack.
This review is a bit rushed, but in the end, buy this game. It's endless fun and you'll have plenty of good memories, especially if you have some friends to play it with.