Sony’s “Play, Create, Share” initiative started in 2008 with LittleBigPlanet, a puzzle platformer that not only had the player exploring a set of pre-built levels, but allowed enabled them to create levels of their own and share them online with a global community. LBP centered on user-generated content and in February of this year, an astounding two million levels had been created and shared.
2010 rolls on and United Front Games comes out with an ambitious new IP that takes the same “Play, Create, Share” ethos to the wild world of kart racing. I take ModNation Racers to a day at the track and find out if it has the stuff to capture pole position. See my review after the jump.
Let’s Play
In ModNation Racers you play as a “mod” called Tag, a young racer who wants to be part of the ModNation Racing Championship (MRC), a set of tours that takes place in exotic locales and has its contestants dueling it out with wacky weapons. With the help of a rag-tag crew and an irascible pit crew chief, you set out to realize you dream of becoming the king of kart racers.
The race controls are simple and intuitive, and once you have gotten the hold of it, drifting becomes such fun. In most cases the act of drifting becomes an essential part of your arsenal as it helps to fill your boost meter, and you can use some of that boost to stay ahead of the competition, activate traps, and use it as a shield to protect your kart incoming attacks. To progress in career mode, you usually need to place in the top three finishers, and from that perspective you might think it simple, but ModNation introduces two additional challenges that may have you racing the track a couple of more times. These challenges vary from running a clean lap to side-swiping opponents to taking out specific racers. Finishing first and successfully completing the additional challenges during the race unlocks a mano-e-mano grudge match with MRC’s elite racers, the bosses on certain tracks. Beat them and you’ll unlock loads of items that can be used when creating your own mods and tracks. While some people would relish these challenges, I found them to be a cause of some frustration, especially towards the latter stages of the competition where the AI gets incredibly cheap.
They are over-powered, have perfect aim, and are drift kings. This issue seems to plague arcade racers and ModNation Racers has fallen victim to it. More often than not, the AI opponents seem to have shields up at the very moment you fire a weapon at them. No matter how well you drive, they keep right on your tail and in the last stretches or in critical race moments, you are bombarded (sometimes consecutively) with fully-charged weapons and, much like your kart, any chances of a win go down in a ball of flames. It can lead to multiple restarts and some consternation so be warned. It would have been nice to choose a difficulty setting for the career mode but there doesn’t seem to be one, although bizarrely there is an option for that when you want to do a quick race.
Aside from the cheap-ass AI, another cause of concern is the looooooooooooading times. You know how people talk about watching paint dry? Well I think paint might get bored while it waits for ModNation Racers to load. The loading times are bad. Ok, perhaps bad isn’t a good choice of word, after all Michael Jackson sang bad and it was actually good. Let’s move to a more quantitative approach – I timed the interval from pressing X to start the game in the XMB to point where I am able to control the character and it was an agonizing 2 minutes, 15 seconds. I can’t remember a game in recent history that took so long to start. Thankfully the time taken to load the tracks is less, although it’s still between 30 to 60 seconds, and after a race it’s another 20-second wait to return to the race selection menu. Whilst I admire United Front Games giving players enough time to go to the fridge, bust open a can of their favourite drink, and casually saunter back to their spots (proper hydration is key to extended gaming sessions), I find the load times a little unbearable.
There are a decent amount of tracks in the MRC (28 in total) that are all made out of the same four environments ranging from scorching deserts, seaside areas, mountain terrains, and tropical jungles. Although it was exciting and challenging at times, ModNation Racers’ single-player experience felt a little short, lacklustre, and ultimately forgettable. Like the game that inspired it, I think ModNation Racers strength lies more in its creation and sharing tools.
Creation Science
When you’re not racing, you’re hanging around in the ModSpot, the central hub for all things ModNation. From this hub, you can connect with people who you want to play online, take part in hot lap races, view popular mods and carts, and build and share things of your own.
The creators will want to head straight to the Creation Station, the studio that houses all the tools needed to create mods, karts, and tracks. When it comes to your mod, you start off with a blank canvas of a character, and then proceed to customize virtually everything about the character, be it the colour of its skin, the distance between its eyes, or whether it should sprout a plant from the top of its head. If you have unlocked mods from the career mode, they are available for you to remix. You can create one in a couple of minutes (seconds if you press the “randomize” button) or spend a great deal of hours tweaking your character to perfection. Creating a kart is the same process where you can either start with a base chassis and build it up from scratch or remix a kart that has been unlocked, or just randomize it. The sheer amount of bodies, paint, parts, stickers, and accessories is mind-boggling and once again it’s entirely up to you to customize as much or as little of it as you want. Just a note here that the parts you add to your kart have no effect on its speed, handling, or boosting ability. All carts handle the same, however you can set your preferences of acceleration versus top speed, and whether your driving style favours drifting over handling.
LPB’s map creator whilst powerful was overwhelming to me. I could never transfer my grand designs from paper to life. I feared using the track editor for that reason, but found that it was more intuitive. Once again you start with a blank canvas, choose a theme, and use the track-laying steamroller to press out the general layout of the track. You can add uphill climbs, hairpin turns, bridges, alternate routes, hazardous traps. The autocomplete tool completes your track and the autopopulate tool adds various props to it. Similar to the mod and kart editors, it is possible to churn out a track in 5 to 10 minutes, but with the grand selection of advanced tools and preset creations available, control freaks are sure to spend hours tweaking their tracks and making them as crazy-fun as possible.
Sharing is Caring
Every bit of content you create in ModNation Racers can be shared with the rest of the community. Give your creation a name, add some optional keywords, and publish it. It’s that simple and just as simple to find creations from others. There are hundreds and hundreds of mods and karts based on characters in films, TV, comics, and pop culture. It’s a treasure trove and you can easily spend hours just browsing, rating, commenting, and downloading. The creations download in seconds and you can use them when you’re offline, or playing split-screen, or racing it out with your online buddies. Word has it that ModNation Racers has already amassed half a million creations and counting. The filtering system works quite well and you can find creations that are the most popular, highest rated, newly uploaded, and there’s a keyword search for specifics.
Unfortunately the loading times that plagued the single-player mode also extends to the online play, where you have to wait (in some cases, quite a while) until the lobby you’re in has the required minimum number of racers. Once that’s done, you’re informed the race will start in 60 seconds. It lies, after that time has elapsed, you’re faced with another loading screen, and finally you can race. After all action has ended, you wait to return to the ModSpot only to be asked if you want to find another XP race! Repeat this process over a few hours and it tends to become frustrating. By the end of it, you’ll be humming the loading music like a pro. Speaking of the game music, it’s so incidental that this one-liner should just about cover it, but you’ll be happy to know that Modnation Racers supports custom soundtracks.
Ultimately ModNation Racers can be a deep and involving experience or a happy-go-lucky quick racer, it really depends on the amount of time you want to invest in it. The creationists are sure to love cranking out the content, sharing it with the world, and getting affirmed for their efforts. The more casual gamers who aren’t interested in making their own stuff will be happy there’s a boatload of content to download and try out. Everyone’s a winner, yay! Sure the loading times, aggressive AI, and sometimes dodgy matchmaking system may scuff some of polish off ModNation Racers but it’s a charming, colouful, fun game that is definitely a podium finisher and one that all kart racing fans should have in their library.