ModNation Racers showed up and I decided to jump right in. The game has a heavy-handed focus on editing your car and racer to the point of continually dropping you back into the mod station after several races. Personally, I felt it a waste of time as I had already done my editing when first offered the chance and the game continually prodding me to do so was cumbersome and annoying.

The game is very heavy on creating your own content, offering you tons of options and many that are unlockable as rewards for achieving certain things in each race. In fact, it’s really all about meeting the specific goals in order to unlock all of those items and really little else. Of course, each goal also wants you to finish in 1st place.

Sure, there are online leaderboards and rankings. There are multiple tracks and races to unlock, experience and win. However, it often feels like they focused so much on the creation aspect of the game that they failed to incorporate a fully functional racing experience. Also, some of the load times are rather ridiculous and can be upwards of a minute to minute and a half. Considering a race takes three to five minutes, it’s rather a long time to wait for it to load up.

It is, of course, a cart racer meaning you’re not going to get a realistic racing experience and that’s fine. I didn’t expect to. However, I did expect to have a worthwhile cart racing experience. Perhaps I just expected too much, having recently played Sonic & SEGA All-Stars, Blur and several other full-featured cart-like racers.

It’s not that the racing experience is bad, it’s just poor. Drifting is counter-productive yet almost necessary if you want extra boost. Drafting is passable but far from perfect and often a boost pad will put you barely ahead of the other racers who did not hit it. There’s little sense of actual speed that has been achieved with other cart racers and overall, while it’s entertaining, it’s not something I see myself going back to again and again. Perhaps if I have some friends over we might run a few laps and that’s about it. It’s almost as if they were hoping to make the LittleBigPlanet of cart racers and are relying on user-generated content instead of solid gameplay.