Hands-on: Modnation Racers

Every now and then a game gets announced and you think, mmm no thanks, and later it turns out to be awesome. That’s exactly what happened at Gamescom this week when I had some time to play a build of ModNation racers over at Sony’s press area.Should you be blissfully unaware, ModNation Racers is a racing game a-la Mario Kart, but adds all the things we’ve come to love about Sony’s other game in the “Play Create Share” catagory, LittleBigPlanet, and is a Playstation exclusive, being co-developed by United Front Games and Sony itself.

MNR allows players to create, play, and share their own custom characters, karts, and tracks with great customizability and attention to detail. Players are able to share their content with anyone, and anyone who has such content can make changes and personalize. What’s more, you’ll even be able to see who was the original author, and who made which changes after that.

Making your own racing track if probably one of the most well-known features of MNR, and as it happens, it’s also one of the easiest things on the planet. Using a brush-like system, you can pick things like water, buildings, trees and other objects, even raise and lower the surface. Creating a simple decent-looking track can be done in just a few minutes, something that was impossible with LittleBigPlanet levels last time I checked.

The weapon pickups in the MNR are slightly different than your average kart racing game in that they are upgradable. For example, say you’d pick up a missile, grab another and it’ll get upgraded to a homing missile, and at the third it’d hypothetically change into a nuclear missile. Pick-up upgrades are certainly an interesting twist for this kind of game, that’s for sure.

Of course you can’t release a kart/racing game these days without online multiplayer, but sadly at this time, all I know about the online functionality is that it’ll be there.