Before buying Modnation racers on sale for £11.99 from the PSN store, I had low expectations, to say it’s another Mario Kart clone is an understatement. So far my expectations have been met, making Modnation Racers one of the most underwhelming purchases of my year so far.
One of my biggest gripes has to be the way the menu is navigated. It’s all so inconsistent. Some menu buttons have to be pressed with the X button, whilst being navigated using the D-Pad, whilst over menu items HAVE to be touched. It makes for an annoying experience, and one I hope never gets repeated on any other game.
The game started up with no help or indication of what to do. You could navigate the menu screen, scrolling left and right to choose a specific option, (make a car, make a modnation racer, spend tokens, championship race etc.) but there was no help, nothing to say “welcome, lets do a few things to get you started. Over here we have the car garage where you can store all your vehicles…..” It made for an annoying start from the offset.
Gameplay is clunky at the best of times, and that really isn’t an understatement. Framerate often drops way below the smooth 60fps in usually gets, meaning choppiness is to be expected throughout each and every race. Load times are also horrendous, my PC boots up faster than this game. It all makes for a bad experience. This all deters from the fact Sony have actually made a nice Mario Kart clone, albeit no where near as good, but hey things need time right?
I shall write a full review soon, but so far I wouldn’t recommend buying Modnation Racers unless you really want something to play on your lonely Vita. I’m so far half way through the championship, and will write up a full review once I’ve played each of the game modes and finished the championship.