ModNation Racers: Hands On

Did you enjoy LittleBigPlanet, but wish it had more racing? Well your prayers are being answered with ModNation Racers, which aims to do to kart racing what Sackboy and co did to side-scrolling platformers. What does that actually mean? In a word: customisation. In some more words: customisation and a heavy focus on an online community.

We recently went hands on with a preview build of ModNation Racers, and it was an interesting experience. I’d seen it at E3 last year, and it looked like a pretty cool premise – and a hard one to pull off. Encouragingly, it looks like the developers are mostly on the right track.

At heart, the game is a kart racer along the lines of Mario Kart (aren’t they all?). You’ll be racing along tracks trying to beat your opponents, all the while picking up weapons and running over speed ramps. It’s not all identical, thankfully – by drifting and drafting around the track, you fill up a ‘boost’ bar that you can use at any time. You can also use it up on a temporary shield, which is essential if you want to avoid incoming enemy attacks. Weapons can also be upgraded – you might have a level one ‘sonic boom’, say, but if you drive over more weapon caches, it can be upgraded a couple of times, making it far more destructive to your opponents. It’s a pretty cool system, and combined with the shield/boost mechanism, really forces you to think tactically about how and when you use your power-ups.

Of course, to talk about only the racing mechanics in ModNation is like focusing on the entrée (that’s the starter dish to any Americans reading) of a five-course meal. The big thing about this game is its suite of modding features, and the ability to take absolutely everything online to share with others.

The game allows you to create racers, karts, and even entire tracks from scratch. You can spend hours tinkering away at the character you’ve created – there’s a wealth of options here, and you unlock more as you progress through the game’s various modes. It’s definitely on par with LittleBigPlanet in this regard, which is very cool to see. Modifying your kart is a similar affair – there are a ton of bodies, wheels, spoilers, and other accessories to choose from. What’s even better are the ‘silly’ categories scattered throughout that let you have a steam-powered engine or wooden wagon wheels.

Actually, let’s talk about the humour in ModNation Racer for a moment. I wasn’t expecting it, but it’s actually pretty funny at times – it's as if a few key developers injected a bit of wacky personality while no one was looking. The commentators, most prominent in Career mode, play off each other nicely, and the whole story is actually pretty charming in an understated way. Considering how much the focus is on custom creations and online sharing, finding out there’s actually a giant barrel-full of quirky vitality inside was a pleasant surprise.

Track creation is one of the biggest bullet points, of course. Making a track feels good, and it’s easy to have something up and running very quickly. I just couldn’t help but feel for the people coding this thing – it surely must have caused a lot of sanity to go down the drain. Still, the end result is good – you choose from one of four settings (such as alpine or seaside), set the elemental effects, and you’re away. There are a large number of ‘brushes’ with which you can paint the ground, raising or lowering hills, mountains, water and more. Laying out the track is also easy, and there’s even a very handy ‘auto-fill’ tool that populates the area with pretty trees, buildings and the like. Thankfully, performing test drives on the track is a near-instantaneous affair, allowing you to pop down to ground level very quickly.

Of course, making awesome tracks isn’t fun if no one else can play them. ModNation Racers will allow you to upload your creations for the world to race on, much in the same way as LittleBigPlanet. Our preview build didn’t have online access unfortunately, so it’s all theoretical at this point, but hopefully we’ll be able to give it a proper test run in the near future. Your main hub will also hold a lot of other online-related information, like current best global lap times for tracks and featured racers.

With all these features in place, you can’t help but expect some areas to be rougher than others. I was playing Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing at the same time as this game, and the difference in the core gameplay was easy to spot. The feel of driving your kart in ModNation seemed a bit too floaty, at least to my mind. The framerate was also pretty juddery a lot of the time – but that, at least, is most likely to be fixed up in the next couple of months.

Beyond a few hiccups, the core gameplay is solid fun (especially with friends), the track creation is a breeze, and the customisation options are easy to get lost in. Hopefully ModNation Racers can deliver on the promise I’ve seen here – we’ll find out in a couple of months’ time.