ModNation Racers: Road Trip Review

There are certain expectations to be had when a game comes from the home console to a handheld device. The game almost certainly won’t look as good, some features will be missing,  the game may not control as well, or perhaps the performance might take a hit. ModNation Racers: Road Trip for the PlayStation Vita handily marks off all of those checks and then some, resulting in a game that feels vastly inferior to 2010’s ModNation Racers for the PlayStation 3.

While all the customization users expect from the ModNation franchise is here, there isn’t much else to keep fans of the franchise or the kart racing genre coming back for more.

ModNation Racers is best known for its customization, and there is absolutely no shortage of that in Road Trip. Tracks, mods and cars users have created for the PlayStation 3 version of the game are downloadable and usable here, providing for a vast wealth of options right out of the box.

This gives you an enticing reason to go back to the game because you will basically have an infinite number of tracks available from day one with many more being added daily (by potential experts who have been working with the PS3 version of the game since 2010). Sadly, here’s where the usefulness of the customization ends. While you can download mods and cars to your heart’s content, there is absolutely no gameplay difference from one mod (or car) to the next, and without online play, there’s no one to show off your ingenious decision to have Batman driving the A-Team van.

That’s not completely unexpected, and not something I’ll hold against the game. The real shame here is that the performance sliders for your cars from the PS3 version of the game are gone. While all the cars were exactly the same in terms of performance, you were able to tweak the handling / drifting and speed / acceleration to suit your gameplay style. In Road Trip, you’re locked into the default performance, which wouldn’t be a problem if the game controlled well. Sadly, it does not.

I’ve put well over 6 hours into ModNation Racers: Road Trip now, and I don’t feel like I have any more of a grip over the controls (than I did the first time I loaded it up). There’s a constant feeling of being completely out of control when racing, and the slightest tap from another racer can and will send you flying across the track into traps and gaps. There is also a Driver Assist option that can be turned on at any time, but this takes the out-of-control feeling to the other extreme, where you can often feel the game driving for you.

This makes races feel like a flip of a coin no matter if you play with the assist on or not, because you can go straight from 1st to 8th in the last leg of a race because of something you feel you had absolutely no control over. The rubber-banding AI doesn’t help either, as it’s clear that they will easily catch up to you if you’re ahead of them, but if you find misfortune and end up far behind, you’ll never see them again.

For those not familiar with the series, ModNation Racers is your standard kart racing fare. There are up to eight mods racing on a track strewn with power-ups, shortcuts and traps, with your goal being to come in first by any means necessary. The campaign mode of the game features five tours and one bonus tour with five races each. Each race has a couple of achievements attached to it, which will give you additional customization options if you can meet the requirements and finish the race in the specified place. Some of these achievements are simple – like taking out a certain number of opponents – while others are downright impossible without luck, such as not hitting any walls for an entire lap.

There’s a lot of variety to the campaign tracks, but none of them is especially fun to play. It doesn’t help that it often feels like the game’s engine doesn’t know what to do in certain situations, as using the warp power-up sent me flying off the edge of the track more than a couple times. There were also a few times when I took a ramp at just the wrong angle and ended up outside of the track, making my only choice to manually reset my kart and take a massive penalty because of it.

Besides the campaign and a quick race mode, there’s a quite good time trial mode to be found here. I’m not sure if it’s the absence of the random chaos the AI players can create or the Trackmania like quality to it, but the time trial mode is my favorite part of ModNation Racers: Road Trip. You can choose to face off against global, friend or local ghosts on any track available in the game. Without the AI or the multitude of traps and obstacles on the tracks, the racing can feel alright, though still not great.

On the performance side of things, the game runs decently most of the time. However, if you have a full suite of mods using power-ups at once on the screen, the framerate can drop to an extreme degree, making it feel laggy and unresponsive. I’ve also noticed that on a lot of the tracks that were created on the PS3, the framerate was consistently low for the entire race, no matter what was going on around me. This is a shame because those tracks are going to be the most complex and users have had two years to become familiar with the track creating process.

The load times, however, are absolutely atrocious. Loading a race on the downloadable version of the game has always taken me somewhere between 50 and 60 seconds, and even loading up simple things such as the studio in which you download items seems to take much longer than it should. Navigating the menus to download things is also way more sluggish than it ought to be, with each item taking a while to load up the preview and a couple more popups than necessary to  actually download things.

All the editing options you would want are present, and they all use the touch-screen controls to somewhat good use. You can draw a track or move and scale stickers with your finger, but none of it feels as precise as using physical controls would.

In the end, ModNation Racers: Road Trip feels like a missed opportunity. Many of the launch games have proven that the Vita has the ability to provide the console experience on a handheld device, but this one is a step in the wrong direction. The lack of online multiplayer is a shame, but from the way the game controls, the last thing I would ever want to do is experience that chaos in a race full of other players. There is an ad-hoc local multiplayer mode, but without friends around with the game and system, I’m in no position to pass judgment on that. If you absolutely need a kart racer from the Vita’s launch lineup, Road Trip is your only option. If you’re looking for any racing game, though, there are greener pastures.

Tags: ModNation Racers: Road Trip, PlayStation, PlayStation Vita, PSV, SCE, Sony Computer Entertainment, Vita