Built as the spiritual successor to LittleBigPlanet (which now has its own fully fledged sequel) and created with the same ethos in mind, ModNation Racers is the second title in (hopefully) a series featuring the Play. Create. Share tagline. This racing game was announced at last year’s E3, and has since been highly anticipated. The developers have made a great job of highlighting how customisable the game is with the ability to create your own characters, karts and even tracks at your disposal. But will ModNation Racers live up to the hype which has been so elegantly built up? And is it worthy to be part of the Play. Create. Share. train? Read on for more details…

The basis of the story is the same old cliché that we’re used to, you’re a rookie racer who aspires to be the best in the world, the game starts when you get entered into the ModNation Racing Championship, as you progress through the game, you slowly beat the best of the best and eventually become World Champion – see? Heard it before! But… the story’s not all bad; as said above, the basis of the story is clichéd, it’s how the game builds upon it that makes it much better.

For a start you don’t have to stick with the main character, Tag. ModNation Racers utilises its customisability to let you create your own Mod which you can follow the adventure through with. Secondly, there is quite a bit of comic value stuffed into the story, with some genuinely funny bits (we’re talking sniggers here, not rolling on the floor laughing) but don’t expect too much – this isn’t a comedy after all. One thing to emphasise here is that although the story isn’t brilliant, it is above adequate and it serves the career mode well. Just remember to keep in mind that ModNation Racers is a racing game, and not an RPG or some other story-heavy genre, so don’t expect to see people rushing to buy this game because of the ‘engaging and emotional storyline’ and what-not.

Not the best story found in a game, but boy can you jump!

Like LittleBigPlanet, there are three main types of gameplay to sink your teeth into here. First of all is the bog-standard ‘Play’ mode, which includes the main career, and quick races of any track of your choosing as well as split-screen for up to four players. The career mode is a series of about thirty races, which can be done pretty quickly, about 5 or 6 hours if you’re really quick. The learning curve can be pretty steep at times, with the first few races letting you get used to the controls before the AI suddenly gets a brain, and you find yourself winning (or losing) by mere inches. Of course, in the later stages of the career, you really have to start using the skills you’ve honed, with some races becoming incredibly frustrating.

Of course, you don’t just have your driving skills at hand to help you on your journey. Placed throughout every level are weapons pods which will feature one of four weapons – Sonic Blast, Missile, Bolt and Quickstart. You will then have three options, either use the weapon straight away in order to get ahead of your competitors; place it as a mine behind you; or save it up for later. If you do the latter, then the next weapon pod you drive over will upgrade your weapon, quickly making a harmless missile into a barrage of rockets for example. Think along the lines of Mario Kart or the glory days of Crash Team Racing.

Weapons. What could make a game more complete?

Once you’ve finished the career there is still plenty to do within the events there. Each event has three challenges to complete – with one of them dedicated to unlocking the next event. The other two challenges can range from taking down X opponents with weapons, to scoring X points by drifting. These challenges can be great fun and each one you complete will unlock various items for you to use in the Create modes.  Some events offer an extra ‘Grudge match’ with one of the ‘Elite’ racers if you manage to complete all three challenges. These matches turn up the difficulty a bit whilst giving you one final challenge to complete – again it can be various things but usually its to win the match.

Each level also has five tokens hidden within its track. Once found, these tokens can be spent in the shop, where the game will randomly choose an unlockable item to give you. If collectibles aren’t your thing then don’t fret, because there are also twenty-eight developer lap and race times for you to beat, one for each track made by United Front Games. These don’t unlock rewards as such, but beating them all nets you a silver trophy.

The second mode is Create mode. Here is where the advertised customisation really kicks in with the ability to create your own Mods (drivers), Karts (vehicles) and Tracks. The customisation options are incredibly detailed whilst staying relatively simple. In the Mod and Karts section, you can change clothes, hairstyle, body type, wheels, as well as change the colour and the variation of each feature as well. You also have access to a wide range of stickers such as numbers, letters, shapes and more. These can easily lead to you creating your own logos and emblems to put on your creations and can help to make every single one unique. If you’re not feeling up to the task though, there is a simple ‘Randomise’ option which generates a random Mod/Kart for you to use.

The track editor is by far the most surprising though, again by how deeply you can control what you’re doing whilst maintaining the simplicity to create a good track within half an hour. You’ll be able to edit the width, height, even banking of the track as well as where the item pads are, where the shortcuts are; even sun position, cloud cover, water level and wind speed. But the best thing here is the Auto-Populate mode. No-one wants to play a track – no matter how good- without a decent environment, good scenery etc. and sadly not everyone has the time to put a couple of extra hours into the track to make it ‘online worthy’; the auto-populate mode however helps people in that plight, as within a matter of seconds, your track can be decorated to a high standard.

It's all about banking, width and height to create the perfect track.

If you can put the time in though, it really is worth it, because no matter how good the auto-populate feature is, you can still tell if a creation has been decorated by a computer. Putting this extra time in allows you to put your own personal touch on your track, and we’re talking hours here, not days like LBP.

The last mode to talk about is the ‘Share’ mode. All of the mods, karts and tracks you have made can be published online for the gaming community to play with. They can then say their opinions on what you’ve made by voting or commenting. Also available for you to do is just general online racing – be it a single race or a series. At the time of writing, there seemed to be very few people playing online making it difficult to get more than four player (the bare minimum) in a race. There are plenty of other little things to do around the main ModSpot area. If you are online then you’ll be joined by several other players in the main area. The Hot Lap section is basically a time trial. Every day a new track is selected and the top times are displayed for all to see. Also on display are the top three downloaded Mods and Karts as well as tracks of the day.

One thing I do have to add though which I was a tad disappointed with was the load times. The initial load is about a minute, to load ModSpot is another thirty seconds, and to load a track is another forty or so seconds. I know this isn’t a major problem, but it does tend to lead to a stop-start experience where you feel discouraged from varying your activities too much (such as building a track and then doing some career races) because of the long load times. It has been confirmed that there will be a patch to reduce these load times, so this minor hiccup only takes the game down a peg or two in my eyes.

The load times are pretty bad, but once you're in, the game is as fun as anything.

On to graphics now, and I have to say, I really didn’t know what to write here. The graphics aren’t jaw-dropping like Killzone 2 or Uncharted 2, yet they’re not terrible. They just quietly suffice and you don’t really notice them to be honest. The framerate is stays pretty much constant with maybe a couple of drops when the screen gets really busy, but this only tends to happen when creating tracks, even then it’s a rare occurrence. There is little or no lag whilst online, from what I’ve played of it at least (and I’ve played quite a lot). Generally, the graphics are impressive, mainly because that they’re so well blended in and proficient, that you forget that you’re playing a game.

The soundtrack to the game is an interesting one which is all together great as well as quirky, which encompasses the game and its vision perfectly. If you don’t like the soundtrack however, you can use the custom soundtrack feature to instantly put one of your songs on. It’s as simple as pressing the PS button, going to your music and playing it.

To completely suck the game dry of all its fun will take many hundreds of hours, with a seemingly endless stream of content constantly being released as well as the occasional and inevitable DLC from United Front Games, this game will keep providing you with reasons to keep coming back – just like LittleBigPlanet. Sure, to completely finish the career will take under fifteen hours, but that’s just the start, once you’ve done that, there’s so much more for you to do providing you with endless amounts of fun.

The trophies also seem to be quite varied in their difficulty, with the first few requiring you to win a race, go online or create something, and the more difficult ones getting you to win every race, beat all of the developers times or get over a quarter of a million Create experience (which is no easy feat, believe me). If you are crazy enough to attempt the Platinum, I would suggest it would take you between 50 and 100 hours, depending on how popular your creations are, and how skilled you are under the pressure of an online race.

There's a whole world of online to explore, so don't think you're just stuck playing the computer...

After seeing this game at last year’s E3, it was plain to see that this game was going to go far. And it has. The culmination of a great and challenging career mode, with some extra goodies for you to collect; a fantasticly simple yet in-depth create mode and a positively thrilling online mode all leads to a brilliant game which will leave you playing for hours on end – watch out for those days where you stay up until four in the morning, telling yourself “just one more race”.  The steady and proficient graphics as well as the level of customisation all put a cherry on top of an ever expanding cake. Sure, the load times are long, but that’ll be fixed. All this game needs to reach further is a talented community who’ll be loyal to their game. It’s so tempting to give this game a perfect score, but the way the share system works leads to the most popular creators being rewarded rather than the most skilled or the best creators, and that is my only major problem with this game, along with a few minor faults – sort all that out, UFG, then come back to me and I might just reconsider…

Oooh, one final note… if you really want to know how simple it is to create a track, the pictures with a ModNation stamp in the bottom right are of tracks that I have made, and I’m no architect or city planner here. This just shows how easy the controls are to use, and if you like my tracks just search for ‘rymanb’ as an author.