Sony continues their “Play – Create – Share” mantra with ModNation Racers, a game that allows you not only to create your own racer and paint your own kart, but design your very own unique tracks.

Kart racing games have a long established formula and Modnation Racers doesn’t veer to far away from the track and as a result, driving your kart is a relatively easy process. You drift around corners burning rubber as you go and pick up weapons to slow down the competition. You have rockets, bombs and boosts all with three additional power-ups and you slowly accumulate boost power by performing successful drifts, prolonged slipstreaming manoeuvres and successfully performing airborne spin.

Races are broken down into career, quick race and online where you can participate in a single or series of races. While racing online you will persistently accumulate XP that is tracked and viewable to all other racers. Career mode places you in the role of Tag a graffiti artist who has ambitions to be crowned the champion of the ModNation Racing Championship. This is nothing more than a series of races with ever escalating difficulty, but each race is bookmarked by videos, some of which are pretty funny. Series commentators Biff Treadwell and Gary “Raisins” Reasons, who adhere to the stereotypical sports commentator cliches, manage to create a fun big race atmosphere. To progress in the series you must place third or better in each race with each race having other stipulations such as drift for 10,000 points or drive over each boost pad to unlock new items to modify your kart and mod (driver). For any completionist successfully completing each races three level tier objectives will easily absorbed hours.

But the Career mode is only a small percentage of the time you will spend racing. The game is designed to be one large community, sharing track designs and car vinyl layouts. The pre-made tracks for the most part are very bland and feel like they have appeared in various other kart racing games. The outrageous Sinkhole is the games only standout track and mastering the seemingly endless spiral bank is a skill that few will master. Whereas user created tracks are anything but bland, there is the usual copyright infringement that you will find with any game that relies heavily upon user created content. Once you scroll past the Mario Kart track copycats you can find tracks of varying difficulty but all with the same care and attention to detail that the games pre-made tracks display.

Creation in ModNation racer is a simple process. The tools to create and modify Karts and Mods are a balance of simplicity for people wishing to spend little time, to excruciatingly detailed, for players wishing to painstakingly recreate the Delorean from back to the future. Mods are all a defined size and shape, your creativity is left to flourish through an elaborate colour palette, texture type and an expansive wardrobe of clothes. So if you want to create your own version of Sonic the hedgehog to join the thousands of others already available to download you can, but most enjoyment will come from people requesting to download a Mod version of your Uncle Bob. Kart creation is a little more limited but you are still able to stamp your own creativity on any vehicle. You will select a body type from a large selection ranging from Soapboxes to ice cream vans but how the body is coloured and what is bolted onto it is up to you.

Track creation is a breeze, you drive the track you wish to create and the creation engine does the rest.  If all you want to create is a basic track, layout the route and allow the track auto-populate function do the rest. It will place weapon pick-up points, ramps and select the track material, with the right theme it will even add livestock as mobile obstructions. It is the epitome of simplicity, but if you wish to get into the track micromanagement even that is relatively easy too. Track camber, short-cuts and landscaping are no more difficult to add and manipulate that the initial track laying. The game does feature an extensive library of tutorial videos but you will have no idea how good the track is until you publish the track for all player to download.

However there is a dark dirty side to ModNation Racers. The initial 3 minute load time to the main menu and the time it takes to load each career race, are unacceptably long. Oneline has it’s fair share of problems too as you can find yourself being unexpectedly disconnected from races and waiting in half-empty race lobbies is a regular affair. The majority of online races will sadly feature only the minimum 4 drivers, but even if you are lucky enough to get into a 12 player race it’s a chaotic experience at best.

Even with the excessively long load times and online issues, ModNation Racer is still a great Kart racer. Whether you intent to play the fun single players experience, some local splitscreen, or concentrate on being the world’s number one track designer, Modnation Racers is worth the shelf price for anybody looking for a fun PS3 racer.

Mark Craven

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