ModNation Racers – Can anyone other than Nintendo Make a Good Kart Racer?

We’ve all been playing Mario Kart since we were kids. The familiar characters combined with the ability to drop into last in multiplayer just so you can blue shell your friend for stealing your three red shells via Boo (though if that happened it was your fault for not taking out the red shells to get them ready in the first place), make the Mario Kart series some of the best racing games, despite their cartoony nature. Logically, many people have tried to copy its style in the past, and none of them have managed to develop any staying power. However, ModNation Racers for the PS3 and PSP makes a better effort than most have done in the past.

Cover of ModNation Racers for the PS3 - Photo Courtesy of Sony

There are a few things that Mario Kart has always lacked. One of the most prominent of these is the lack of a storyline. One reason that Mario Kart has never had a story is because it would be difficult to explain logically why Mario is engaging a race with Bowser when Peach hasn’t even been kidnapped yet. And not only is she not kidnapped, but in the course of the race Mario will inevitably hit her with various weapons. It just wouldn’t make since. Many other Kart racers developed stories but did nothing in actual gameplay to set them apart from the Mario Kart series, and as such always failed to topple the kart racing giant that is Mario. ModNation Racers takes a shot at creating a story that coincides with the racing as well.

Career Mode Trailer - Courtesy of Youtube.com

The short version of the story is that Tag wants to be a racer but he doesn’t have the money to race so his Mother fronts the money and finds a racing coach for Tag. After Tag starts to gain some recognition his car gets destroyed and Tag then has to race for the ModNation equivalent of “The Man,” his Uncle who works for Conservative Motors, a car company that makes really boring cars. After a couple races for Conservative Motors, Tag gets fed up and finds another way to keep racing. And, all the while, Tag slowly develops an arch rival in Espresso, the top racer in ModNation. This makes for a much more complex story than you get from most kart racers, in that the actual racing is the story as opposed to Diddy Kong or Crash Team racing game in which the racing is used as a method of obtaining things for the story. The story for ModNation Racers is just overall more realistic than the typical story of a racing game.

But story should not be the most important part of a racing game. The racing should be. And unfortunately this is a weakness in ModNation Racers. The weapons are somewhat boring in that instead of having a dozen different weapons they have just 4 weapons that get upgraded to greater levels of effectiveness. While this does make collecting weapons worthwhile it also makes first level weapons too weak to really be effective and top tier weapons so effective that getting hit by one of them can drop you from 1^st to 8^th in an instant. There is absolutely no insentive to use a 1^st tier weapon, and once you get a second tier you may as well just wait for the third tier weapon upgrade because its just one more item pod. And during the eternity you have to sit waiting for your car to restart, they have already come out with 6 new games you should probably be playing instead of this.

Some dude about to get wrecked by Hydra missiles - Courtesy of joystiq.com

And then there are the problems with control. Unlike Mario Kart Wii, where the controls are so smooth they could probably convince your sister to sleep with them without even getting her drunk first, ModNation Racers’ controls leave a lot to be desired. It is far too easy to take yourself out of a race for good. And when certain race requirements require you to spin or drift a certain amount in a race, you will often find yourself drifting to much on a turn and losing your directional control, or spin just a little two far while you are in the air, and land facing the wrong direction. The point is that they have you do too much personally and the controls become a little clunky, and in the end take away from the game experience.

However I have not yet spoken about the most unique aspect of ModNation Racers, the customization aspect. ModNation Racers goes to great lengths to give the user vast customizability in cars, characters and even race tracks. You have the ability to create your own race tracks using the same track creator the makers of the game used, or at least that’s what they claim. And though your car doesn’t go any faster based on how you design it, it does give creative players a chance to make their cars their own. Customizing your Mod (character) is a lot of fun too and even enhances the story a bit in that the Tag in the career mode, is whatever Mod you happen to have been using when you entered Career Mode. But if you don’t much care for customization and just wish there were some ready made characters for you to become attached to as your favorite like they have in every other kart racer, then you will be very disappointed with ModNation Racers because they have only one playable character that you didn’t personally create.

Car Customization in ModNation Racers, this person was clearly not very creative. "Oh you made a race car, that's so creative...dick" - Courtesy of nextgn.com

All of these custom creations have one huge downside. Load times for this game are unbearable. Sometimes the load times have been longer than an entire lap on the track you are trying to play. I cannot confirm the customizations to be the cause, but I believe that because of the fact that every local race you play requires the PS3 to render all of your customizations, over and over again. And if you play online, you have to download everyone else’s creations as well. In the end you spend far too much time waiting for a race, and not enough time actually racing.

On the whole a good game, but if you are hoping that someone will have finally given us a kart racing game that will match the omnipresent Mario Kart, then sadly you will be disappointed. ModNation Racers for the PS3 and PSP gets 7.5 clever game references out of 10.

MARIO WINS AGAIN! - Photo courtesy of gamerscityhall.com