Nerd Mentality

PREVIEW - ModNation Racers EU Beta

Posted January 21st 2010 by Will Davey.

ModNation Racers, for those of you that don't know, is essentially a modern take on kart racing. Sure you'll do a lot of racing around built-in tracks, but there's plenty of additions to the game that make it stand out. Not only are you able to create your own custom racers and karts, but you're also able to create your own tracks using the incredibly simple and intuitive track editor. Hopefully that'll be enough to keep the potential online community hooked, because without other players, ModNation Racers could end up quite shallow.

Before you get to the real racing, you're thrown into a hub-style area where you can choose to create custom content, jump online, or play through the career. The career is locked off in the beta, so it's a case of either playing Time Trial against online ghosts, racing other people online, or creating your own content. The hub reminded me of Crash Team Racing back on the PlayStation, and being able to drive around an area instead of just having a menu is a nice idea. Also, if you're connected to the internet, the hub will have other random racers driving around as well, and with an added chat system, you can set up some races or communicate with people easily. Unfortunately, the hub itself was quite laggy when I was online, and the game actually locked up twice whilst trying to load a new area when connected to the internet. Strangely, there wasn't any lag whatsoever when actually racing online, so perhaps that's a technical issue that the developers are still trying to work around.

I'd decided that I wanted to try out all of the customisation first, so I jumped right into the character and kart creators. The two images in this article are direct screenshots from the game, so you can see how imaginative I am when it comes to making my own content in games.  Unfortunately you can't take screenshots of your tracks and export them to the PS3 hard drive in the same way that you can with the racers and karts, so although I did create two tracks, I don't have any pictures.

The character and kart creators are very easy to use, and they show off the game's attractive visual style very well. Some of the tools actually go quite in-depth, allowing you to scale and rotate every part of your face quite precisely. There are plenty of options to choose from when creating them too, but as you'd expect, many of them are locked off in the beta. I'd created a racer and kart that I was happy with in a matter of minutes, and whilst you could spend a lot more time making small, precise changes to many details, I'm personally going to wait until the full release for that.

Track creation is just as simple as creating karts and racers, and you can be playing on a completely functional track within a minute (literally). Once you load up the track creator, you simply hold down a button and control the angle and direction that you want the track to go. There are height and depth limits, but the game will automatically structure the surrounding environment around the road automatically. Once you've finished placing your track, the game will offer to "auto-populate" your track. This will add all of the extra environments details such as trees, barriers etc, power-ups, different track-types and AI racers to your track for you, and as soon as that's done, you can test drive your track instantly. Of course you can do all of that yourself, but if you're pressed for time, or if you simply don't care about the details, you can literally draw a road and have a playable track, ready to publish online, in less than a minute.

As far as basic gameplay goes, ModNation Racers is a solid experience, and it's really what you'd come to expect from a kart racer. The controls and physics aren't particularly realistic, there's plenty of power-ups scattered throughout the tracks, and you'll be able to drift around plenty of tarmac, dirt and water. It's an enjoyable, frantic experience. My initial problem however, is that there can often be just that bit too much going on. With up to twelve players being able to race at once, and with all of those players crowded around and power-ups going off all over the place, I found myself being struck with rockets and lightning every other corner, leaving the actual race quite disjointed. Adding to that is that, if the power-up is strong enough, you can fall out of your kart, and when you get reset to the track there's a half-a-second loading screen that splits up the game even more.

That said, I found tracks with less powerups, or with no power-ups at all to be the most fun. When you drift around a corner, hit someone with a power-up, or "draft" (when you drive behind another player in their slipstream), you get points which add to a yellow bar on the right of the screen. This bar is used as a speed boost, a shield, and a move that throws you left or right, knocking away other racers. This brought in another layer of tactics into the race, as deciding whether to blow all of your points on boosting, or saving it to shield yourself from a barrage of rockets can be the difference between winning and losing. The best thing about the power-ups in ModNation Racers is that they can stack to give you more powerful versions of power-ups. If you collect a power-up and pick up another before using your current one, rather than replacing it, it'll level it up to a more potent version of the one you already have. You can upgrade each power-up twice, giving you three different version of every one, so trying to decide whether to use what you've got or wait to make it even better will be another thing to factor into your racing.

Overall, ModNation Racers has the potential to be a very fun experience. There are a few technical issues still to be sorted, but given that this is a Beta (and more than likely there to stress-test the servers), that's to be expected. The depth of the track creation is very impressive, and the auto-populate tool will definitely make the game appeal to players who may not usually think they have what it takes to create their own content. The only other problems I found with the game, though these would be quite picky, are that the camera angle seemed quite low and close to the kart, and this is more evident in certain situations, particularly when driving up-hill. Plus, the shaky camera effect can often be a bit too shaky, particularly when you're bombarded with power-ups, and it made it hard to follow what was going on. Still, for the most part neither of those don't detract from the experience, and if you're a fan of kart racers, keep an eye out for ModNation Racers over the coming months.

Tags: ps3, Beta, ModNation Racers

Posted in: Gaming, Features

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