LittleBigPlanet Karting — Not The Cheap Cash-In You Expected…

Callum Petch

On September the 29th of 2012, a wannabe games journalist named Callum Petch made a three-hour trip down to London, England to attend the Eurogamer Expo — the UK’s premier videogame… err… expo. His mission? To preview as many games as humanly possible in one day. These are his stories…

I’m going to just get this out of the way, immediately.  This is the game that Modnation Racers should have been.  I mean this in two ways.  The most obvious way is that Modnation Racersshould have been a LittleBigPlanetspin-off to begin with.  A bog-standard kart racer that’s made interesting and fun by having pretty much everything have a User-Generated option (cars, avatars, tracks…) describes LittleBigPlanet to a tee, if you swap out “kart racer” for “platformer”.

Fortunately, that’s not the only way that LBP Karting is the game that Modnation Racers should have been.  The actual playing side is really rather good.

The demo set up gave me two levels, one racing and one combat, but before I get into that I should mention the presentation.  The LittleBigPlanet title is not just there to actually ship copies this time around (the developers are United Front Games who also developed Modnation Racers and, less relevantly, Sleeping Dogs), this really does feel like an LBPgame.  Your hub is the Pod, getting hit by power-ups pops your poor little Sackboy, and the environments and items still carry that ramshackle, “made-up-on-the-fly-in-five-minutes” feeling that makes LBP so distinctive.  In short, it fits and makes this game feel like a logical extension of the franchise rather than a cash-grab spin-off.

As previously mentioned, my demo had no customisation elements which meant that my opinions on the game had to be based solely on the actual gameplay side.  Fortunately, things have improved considerably since Modnation.  Handling is still serviceable, but nothing particularly special.  Power-ups are fairer this time around, with less endlessly-homing weapons coming at a much less frequent pace; whenever I got any clear air, it didn’t feel like the game was going out of its way to murder me.

Things can get especially crazy in the arena levels but it never feels cheap or overwhelming.

Tracks and arenas are more interesting now, as well.  Not only are they pleasant to look at, thanks to the LBP visual style, they’re fun to drive thanks to the LBP gameplay mechanics.  The race track had a moment where everyone had to grab a grappling hook in order to successfully swing across a giant body of water; and the combat arena had constantly surging areas of electricity that pop you if you so much as cough at them.  Again, this goes a long way to making it feel like a true LBP title and not the cheap, Mario Kart knock-off you were expecting.

The final blessing of good news?  The game is genuinely fun to play.  AI difficulty has been toned down considerably, but they still put up a challenge.  There’s a lot of wheel-to-wheel racing, from my experiences, and constantly jostling with the pack for a genuine position, rather than second to last place, is rather exciting.  During none of my four play sessions (two for each mode) was there any point where a barrage of power-ups all flew down on me in quick succession and sent me to the back.  Nor did said barrage ever arrive on the final turn of the final lap as I was about to win.

I didn’t get to try the multiplayer, as the Expo was winding down by the time I got to around to playing LittleBigPlanet Karting, but the fact that I’m already sold on the title without multiplayer is more than a good thing.  This is a genuine improvement on Modnation Racers: a kart racer that’s now actually fun to race.  It’s not revolutionary, it’s not going to blow your mind, but it doesn’t need to.  It needs to supplement those creation aspects and not bore you to death when you do actually have to go racing.  That’s what LBP Karting does and it’s all the better for it.

Take that, F1 Race Stars!