ModNation Racers is a cart-racer, similar to MarioKart, but transforms that template into a "build, share, play" game, driven by custom content, as opposed to "what you buy is what you get". In that regard, it's great. But as a game, is it all it's cracked up to be?
Gameplay: 6.5
The easiest game to compare ModNation Racers to is MarioKart. Everyone who plays games has likely played or seen MarioKart during the series' 15+ year lifespan. It's a simple concept - you race, except you have items that you can use to either speed up, hurt other players or just goof off with.
The biggest problem with any racing game is that it's limited to such a narrow field of gameplay. The objective of any racing game is to finish first. Now, I know you can say "well, the point of any shooter game is to shoot the other team" and I guess that's true on a totally remedial level, but you can expand the gameplay angles and even go as far to make roles in a shooter that have nothing to do with shooting the other team, making it play like an MMO or even an RTS. Racing is confined to this little cage so there's very little you can do to make a racing game stray far from the mold and have it really stand out. The most unique racing game I've ever played is Destruction Derby 2 because you could do a lot more than just drive fast. But we're getting a little off track, how about some talk about ModNation Racers?
In the career mode of ModNation Racers, your character's name is Tag, and you're the rookie on the circuit. You ascend ranks as you win races and win circuits, and follow a silly storyline about you, your crew and the characters surrounding it (commentators, crew chief, etc).
During a race, players have items they can pick up and use to hurt other players or drive faster, but the twist to it in this game is that the items have different level powers. For example, in MarioKart you could randomly get either 3 red shells or just 1 red shell when you picked up an item, where 3 red shells is obviously a better pickup than just 1. When you pick up an item in MNR, you can either use it right away (at level 1) or you can keep it and continue to level up it's power by continuing to run into item orbs (or whatever you want to call them) 2 additional time to get the full power effect from your item. By the 3rd level, it's pretty safe to say that if you have an attack item, basically everyone in front of you is going to get hit by it.
It sounds great, but it's actually not as great as it sounds. By the end of the race, nearly everyone is using immensely powerful items and it makes the race get increasingly more annoying as time goes on.
They thought it would be a good idea to have a point system, and by gaining points by going off jumps, drifting (sliding around corners), drafting or hitting somebody with an attack item, you would have those points translate into energy which you can use to put up shields to hopefully prevent an attack from hitting you, or to burn up via a turbo, making you drive faster.
The problem with this is that the shield is really hard to use. You can try all you want to get the timing down, but most of the time you'll press the shield button to avoid an attack. You'll constantly either press it too early and waste all of your energy, and get hit, or you'll press it too late. Sometimes it seems like you press it right on time but it doesn't activate, and that's due to a slow delay between the time you press the button and when your shields come up. Ultimately, unless you plan on playing the game competitively, just take your lumps and use the energy for turbo. It's quite annoying trying to get the timing down, even though I can understand why they made it skill-based to balance it for online play, but in career mode it's really aggravating if you want to win, but you're not uber-serious about being teh best evar at the game.
A slight plus side to this game is that it doesn't have obvious compensation for slow drivers like MarioKart does, and the difficulty is notably higher than the MarioKart games in terms of CPU racer intelligence.
A lot of users like the game for it's custom content library. You can create essentially anything you can think of, whether that's in the form of a track, a driver or a cart. It's very immense - on the level of Little Big Planet, in fact - and they have very advanced tools to making your creation unique and recognizable to another person. I've seen a lot of different things when browsing the custom content libraries, such as drivers that look like Marvin the Martian, Santa Claus, Snowmen, Spiderman, Sack Boy, etc. It's pretty cool. My cart was a cardboard box, driven by a D battery with a mailbox on the front, and I was determined to stick with that setup for as long as I played the game.
However, ultimately, are we playing a game, or are we playing dress-up? I mean, it's cool and all, but the GAME is what I want to play and the game just isn't all that outstanding. As a whole, racing games just aren't that innovative and I have a hard time leaving one racing game and picking up another without thinking "uh, isn't this basically what's already been done a million times?" If it were a better game, their custom content would mean a lot more to me. And racing games just aren't ever going to jump out of the box to become something completely unique while still being a racing game. MNR is crippled by this limitation.
Presentation: 9.0
It's always hard for me to give bad marks to games based on their presentation because art style is such a huge implication to how the finished product is going to look.
I gave it a 9.0 because it's in a silly, sort of emoticon style where your characters are simple shapes and silly design, but it works well and it's not distracting. Good framerate, good environments. Not much to complain about.
Theatrics: 6.0
The theatrics aren't a very important part of this game, since the only real story is going to be in career mode. And how much of a story are you going to tell when all you're doing is racing? They try to introduce characters and keep a silly story rolling, but after watching the first 3 or 4 cut-scenes, I started skipping them and didn't really care.
They're kind of entertaining, but it's just not the reason people would pick up this game. The score in this category is almost irrelevant.
Controls: 8.0
MNR has decent controls. The only downside is the typical "hold the go button before the race starts to get a boost" doesn't really make much sense because you can't ever figure out the timing. Half the time I hold "X", too, instead of "R2" which is the go button, so I sit there for a few seconds thinking I've screwed up, when I then remember I'm pressing the wrong button.
The shield timing is as awkward as hell, too. I touched on it earlier, but man it's annoying to press the button right on time and then have to deal with that seemingly random delay time before it actually activates. It's a good idea but it's just not executed very well.. it'll likely make new or casual players feel as if it's not worth using.
The drifting controls are a little awkward, too. Half the time I tried to drift, I ran into a wall. Maybe I'm just not good at it, but this seems like a game you should be able to pick up and play, and it just felt like there was something off about it.
Everything else is rather smooth and overall everything handles and behaves pretty well.
Replay Value: 4.0
I just don't fall into either category that would make me want to play this game over and over. Once I raced about 10 times, I felt like I've done about as much as I could within the game's parameters. And yeah, there's a ton of custom content out there, but how much is that really going to change? Making courses is kind of fun, but this game just doesn't offer fun enough gameplay to keep me coming. Even a demo would have satisfied my curiosity.
Besides, with all of the racing there is in open-world games, it almost seems like playing a racing-only game is just an inferior game to most open-world games. I feel like I've done it all, already, and MNR just doesn't offer a ton of unique, game-altering content.
Fun: 6.0
Playing the career mode got boring pretty quickly, and the game really isn't that much different than MarioKart and actually is more frustrating to play than MarioKart. For the flaws I've seen in MarioKart and this game's attempts to correct them, it makes me think the initial flaws probably weren't actual problems afterall.
My Overall Rating: 6.0
Appeal and Recommendations
I would actually say this would be a fairly good party game, because picking it up, playing it, and having fun with friends seems pretty easy. If you have many controllers for your PS3 or a lot of online friends that play it, check it out. And, of course, if you're a racing fan, this is a game that I think will be hard to pass up.
I really don't fit either category, and I'm sure my rating reflects that in some way, but there's a niche of gamers this game will appeal to and if you feel like you're in that group, check it out. A lot of people really love this game, just not me because it doesn't really leap out and do anything unique, while also meaningful.
Gameplay: 6.5
The easiest game to compare ModNation Racers to is MarioKart. Everyone who plays games has likely played or seen MarioKart during the series' 15+ year lifespan. It's a simple concept - you race, except you have items that you can use to either speed up, hurt other players or just goof off with.
The biggest problem with any racing game is that it's limited to such a narrow field of gameplay. The objective of any racing game is to finish first. Now, I know you can say "well, the point of any shooter game is to shoot the other team" and I guess that's true on a totally remedial level, but you can expand the gameplay angles and even go as far to make roles in a shooter that have nothing to do with shooting the other team, making it play like an MMO or even an RTS. Racing is confined to this little cage so there's very little you can do to make a racing game stray far from the mold and have it really stand out. The most unique racing game I've ever played is Destruction Derby 2 because you could do a lot more than just drive fast. But we're getting a little off track, how about some talk about ModNation Racers?
In the career mode of ModNation Racers, your character's name is Tag, and you're the rookie on the circuit. You ascend ranks as you win races and win circuits, and follow a silly storyline about you, your crew and the characters surrounding it (commentators, crew chief, etc).
During a race, players have items they can pick up and use to hurt other players or drive faster, but the twist to it in this game is that the items have different level powers. For example, in MarioKart you could randomly get either 3 red shells or just 1 red shell when you picked up an item, where 3 red shells is obviously a better pickup than just 1. When you pick up an item in MNR, you can either use it right away (at level 1) or you can keep it and continue to level up it's power by continuing to run into item orbs (or whatever you want to call them) 2 additional time to get the full power effect from your item. By the 3rd level, it's pretty safe to say that if you have an attack item, basically everyone in front of you is going to get hit by it.
It sounds great, but it's actually not as great as it sounds. By the end of the race, nearly everyone is using immensely powerful items and it makes the race get increasingly more annoying as time goes on.
They thought it would be a good idea to have a point system, and by gaining points by going off jumps, drifting (sliding around corners), drafting or hitting somebody with an attack item, you would have those points translate into energy which you can use to put up shields to hopefully prevent an attack from hitting you, or to burn up via a turbo, making you drive faster.
The problem with this is that the shield is really hard to use. You can try all you want to get the timing down, but most of the time you'll press the shield button to avoid an attack. You'll constantly either press it too early and waste all of your energy, and get hit, or you'll press it too late. Sometimes it seems like you press it right on time but it doesn't activate, and that's due to a slow delay between the time you press the button and when your shields come up. Ultimately, unless you plan on playing the game competitively, just take your lumps and use the energy for turbo. It's quite annoying trying to get the timing down, even though I can understand why they made it skill-based to balance it for online play, but in career mode it's really aggravating if you want to win, but you're not uber-serious about being teh best evar at the game.
A slight plus side to this game is that it doesn't have obvious compensation for slow drivers like MarioKart does, and the difficulty is notably higher than the MarioKart games in terms of CPU racer intelligence.
A lot of users like the game for it's custom content library. You can create essentially anything you can think of, whether that's in the form of a track, a driver or a cart. It's very immense - on the level of Little Big Planet, in fact - and they have very advanced tools to making your creation unique and recognizable to another person. I've seen a lot of different things when browsing the custom content libraries, such as drivers that look like Marvin the Martian, Santa Claus, Snowmen, Spiderman, Sack Boy, etc. It's pretty cool. My cart was a cardboard box, driven by a D battery with a mailbox on the front, and I was determined to stick with that setup for as long as I played the game.
However, ultimately, are we playing a game, or are we playing dress-up? I mean, it's cool and all, but the GAME is what I want to play and the game just isn't all that outstanding. As a whole, racing games just aren't that innovative and I have a hard time leaving one racing game and picking up another without thinking "uh, isn't this basically what's already been done a million times?" If it were a better game, their custom content would mean a lot more to me. And racing games just aren't ever going to jump out of the box to become something completely unique while still being a racing game. MNR is crippled by this limitation.
Presentation: 9.0
It's always hard for me to give bad marks to games based on their presentation because art style is such a huge implication to how the finished product is going to look.
I gave it a 9.0 because it's in a silly, sort of emoticon style where your characters are simple shapes and silly design, but it works well and it's not distracting. Good framerate, good environments. Not much to complain about.
Theatrics: 6.0
The theatrics aren't a very important part of this game, since the only real story is going to be in career mode. And how much of a story are you going to tell when all you're doing is racing? They try to introduce characters and keep a silly story rolling, but after watching the first 3 or 4 cut-scenes, I started skipping them and didn't really care.
They're kind of entertaining, but it's just not the reason people would pick up this game. The score in this category is almost irrelevant.
Controls: 8.0
MNR has decent controls. The only downside is the typical "hold the go button before the race starts to get a boost" doesn't really make much sense because you can't ever figure out the timing. Half the time I hold "X", too, instead of "R2" which is the go button, so I sit there for a few seconds thinking I've screwed up, when I then remember I'm pressing the wrong button.
The shield timing is as awkward as hell, too. I touched on it earlier, but man it's annoying to press the button right on time and then have to deal with that seemingly random delay time before it actually activates. It's a good idea but it's just not executed very well.. it'll likely make new or casual players feel as if it's not worth using.
The drifting controls are a little awkward, too. Half the time I tried to drift, I ran into a wall. Maybe I'm just not good at it, but this seems like a game you should be able to pick up and play, and it just felt like there was something off about it.
Everything else is rather smooth and overall everything handles and behaves pretty well.
Replay Value: 4.0
I just don't fall into either category that would make me want to play this game over and over. Once I raced about 10 times, I felt like I've done about as much as I could within the game's parameters. And yeah, there's a ton of custom content out there, but how much is that really going to change? Making courses is kind of fun, but this game just doesn't offer fun enough gameplay to keep me coming. Even a demo would have satisfied my curiosity.
Besides, with all of the racing there is in open-world games, it almost seems like playing a racing-only game is just an inferior game to most open-world games. I feel like I've done it all, already, and MNR just doesn't offer a ton of unique, game-altering content.
Fun: 6.0
Playing the career mode got boring pretty quickly, and the game really isn't that much different than MarioKart and actually is more frustrating to play than MarioKart. For the flaws I've seen in MarioKart and this game's attempts to correct them, it makes me think the initial flaws probably weren't actual problems afterall.
My Overall Rating: 6.0
Appeal and Recommendations
I would actually say this would be a fairly good party game, because picking it up, playing it, and having fun with friends seems pretty easy. If you have many controllers for your PS3 or a lot of online friends that play it, check it out. And, of course, if you're a racing fan, this is a game that I think will be hard to pass up.
I really don't fit either category, and I'm sure my rating reflects that in some way, but there's a niche of gamers this game will appeal to and if you feel like you're in that group, check it out. A lot of people really love this game, just not me because it doesn't really leap out and do anything unique, while also meaningful.
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