RETRO – Express yourself in this totally fresh take on the classic kart racing genre! You can create your own Mod character and style its own racing kart, track and even buildings and share them with the rest of the PlayStation community. Oh, I almost forgot: you can race karts as well…

One might think that after Super Mario Karts, and tons of other racing games of this genre, there’s nothing else you can do. Well, “one” must be mistaken: there’s a game which is not only as much fun, as the aforementioned bestseller, but also has another strong feature: the user generated content. With this feature you can form your character, as you want. Want to have a funny Kratos, or Nathan Drake behind the wheel? Check. Want to have a paper cardbox as a superfast car? Check. Want to create and customize every track as you want? Check. You can do everything in ModNation Racers. Or almost.

LittleBigPlanet on wheels

Of course, the Vancouver based team, United Front Games didn’t invent the most unique idea ever: basically ModNation Racers is LittleBigPlanet on wheels. The difference is that ModNation focuses exclusively on racing karts around some of the finest crafted kart tracks about.

The racing itself, against the AI opponents in single player is pretty good. Mixed with the funny karts and even funnier level design you instantly feel at home should you be a Mario Kart fan. Gameplay wise it’s pretty much as good, as Nintendo’s finest too; you race around for three laps against fierce opponents, collecting power-ups along the way to slow down or destroy the other karts. Various speed boosts and hazards are lying along the track ahead of you, so you have to remember the best racing lines and shortcuts on each track.

While earlier levels are easy, you’ll be first without too much of an effort, but from around half way into the game the difficulty curve takes a very step incline. You see, for each race you are set a goal, such as finishing in 3rd or 1st place in order to carry on through to the next race. Once I got to the 3rd series of races I soon found it quite a challenge to get to the first place.

Create your ModDreams!

But the heart of ModNation Racers is in the creation tools and once you finished your initial race with a generic Mod and Kart, you’ll be given access to the Mod Hub, a busy pit area where you can find all the game’s options. Creation tools are a real delight to use. Building your character from the ground is kid stuff, starting off with their skin then adding in facial features, clothes and accessories to suit your taste. You can make some pretty funny designs (Cat created “realistic” Gladriel: a funny red haired gal) and there are full options to change different parts, adjust their sizes and color them the way you like.

At the beginning, you’re given a limited set of components to start with. You can unlock brand new ones in the various races – by collecting tokens or winning some race objectives or you can spend some real dollars online to purchase an excess of goodies. Yes, you’ll have to shell out for some of the funnier content same us with LittleBigPlanet, EyePet and other Sony titles.

Gentlemen, start your engines!

When you’re at last happy with your own character, it’s time to use your creativity again with your car. You’re provided with a stock chassis to build on, and your Kart is built up in a similar way to your Mod. Layer by layer you can pile on a bodyshell, strap on some fancy wheels, a cool engine design and even change your seat and steering wheel.

Finally ModNation Racers gives you a gigantic track design package that works in such a superb way that you’ll probably lose hours to it. Rather than just having you bolt sections of track together like Scalextric or Trackmania ModNation Racers puts you in charge of an immense asphalt-laying machine that you actually “drive” to lay down your initial track layout. Height and width can be adjusted as you start to create your road surface, with the game providing a birds eye view of your track. It will even automatically fill in the circuit if you don’t quite finish the job.

Loading, loading, loading…

ModNations Racers is a pretty good game, but there is one serious issue we should mention: the annoying loading time. We just sat here, with Cat, staring at the screen and waiting loooooong seconds, and even minutes sometime, just to wait for some track to be loaded at last. United Front said that they are working on a patch, to alleviate the loading time, but boy, they are taking their sweet time, just as the tracks to be loaded. Otherwise, if you like kart games, and you have a PS3, you should check it out, since it’s one of the bests.

-BadSector-(2010)

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Developer: United Front Games

Genre: UGC Racing game

Relase date: May 21, 2010