Modnation Racers

Like Kart racing? Firing weapons at your opponents while drifting a straight line? Whipping around a race track in a kart you built with a cartoony character you designed? How about building a track from the ground up, adding extras like scenery jumps and boost pads, then publishing it and letting others race and rate it?

If you answered yes to any or all of the above then keep reading…

ModNation Racers is an EXCELLENT (got that? excellent!!!!)  kart racer. The gameplay is fantastic in its unrealistic comical way, and driving has a almost 0% learning curve for anyone who has ever raced in the digital world. The smooth pick-up and play controls feels very familiar and allow you to jump right into the career mode and get familiar with your weapons.

The Kart combat can be very tense and exciting but the real power in this game is in Sony’s new initiative “Play/Create/Share”. If you’re unfamiliar with Little Big Planet, basically you start out with a simplistic yet fun to play game and you’re given the tools to modify the game, create your own levels, change up the basic character model (or create one from scratch) and then upload them to allow others to download, play and rate them. Even if creation isn’t your thing, this adds extended play to your game because you can just download and use other peoples cars, tracks and characters. With a growing population users, there should be tracks for sometime to come. The creation tools are also incredibly intuitive and smooth (my kids created 4-5 tracks today which are wacky, but race worthy.)

All the joy and pleasure this game brings is by one annoying flaw – LOAD TIMES!

The load times for MNR are ridiculous, they really are the games’ achilles heel. Why it would make you wait between each race is a mystery and annoying; in addition to having to wait almost 2-3 mins between each race the game starts out with a mandatory install of about 2.4GB’s of game data! If its a simple software thing, Sony needs to step up and patch this asap as addressing this technical issue would greatly improve the experience.

Despite the load times this game is a must own for everyone for a number of reasons and even with the load time problem, its still worthwhile. Pick it up and join the community! Play/Create and Share with us.