ModNation Racers: Road Trip is a Kart racer with one key design philosophy. That being allowing the player to freely customize almost any aspect of this game and let their creativity flow. Our first order of business is to create our driver, as well as the kart itself, to our liking. There is a decent amount of options for both. Yet, many more will be unlocked as rewards for winning races or completing objectives within them, as to always keep us wanting to continue experimenting. It does not affect anything outside of the visual appearance. Our kart’s speed, weight, and traction will remain the same. This allows us to make really bizarre creations without consequences, and we artistically challenged lot to hit the Randomize button then never touch the customization features again.
I fall into that latter category. I’m the type of man that rocks a default skin with no shame in most titles. What I am interested in and is a huge selling point to this game is downloading user-made driving tracks or creating your own. If you have played or heard of LittleBigPlanet, you have a good idea of how this system works. It offers near limitless content for us to enjoy. Road Trip even offered the user tracks from the original PS3 ModNation game to give Vita owners a ton of content right out the gate. Great right? Well, it was. As of 2017, the servers have been shut down, so all we have access to is the 30 developer-made tracks. I did not know this going in. Unlike most other titles in the Vita’s PSN store that had their servers shut down, it doesn’t say a word about this on the product page. This is a double-whammy since not only is it massively integrated with its online aspects, it is also a Sony published title.
That was kind of a strange way to open a review, but one I felt necessary to discuss right out the bat and not possibly obscure this fact by placing it further down. Honestly, I likely wouldn’t have bought the title if I knew this myself. It would have been a darned big shame if I decided to gloss over Road Trip, however. This remains a good racing game. One that will take you several hours to get through with the current amount of content. Let’s rewind a bit and take things from the beginning, shall we? Booting up the game will take us to a hub-world of sorts. In here, we can manage the customization from our driver to creating new tracks, access the single-player, or spend the tokens we can get during racing to randomly roll for new skins. The hub world is mainly handled via the touch-screen. You can use the left & right d-pad to switch between areas, though can’t use up & down to browse through them. It is an over-designed menu system that is all style while sacrificing ease of use.
Our main focus after tweaking the look of our character and kart will be the Race Station area. First up, we have Quick Race. This allows us to play on any track we’ve unlocked in the career mode and change a wide variety of parameters, including how many AI drivers there are, their difficulty, and whether to allow weapons. Next on the list is Time Trial. It was originally meant to spur players into competitively trying to get the best lap times on any track we’ve unlocked. Now that the online servers are down, that leaderboard aspect is out the window. You’ll find that it can still function quite well as an impromptu practice mode since we can take it as slow as we want to truly learn the track. There is no lap limit. We are free to drive around as much as we want until we get our fill and move on to an actual race.
Finally, we have the most important option at third. That being the Career mode. I have no idea why they placed it so low, and is where the hub-world functionality puts a damper on things. You slowly have to scroll through the first two with your finger to reach it every time. It sounds insignificant, but in combination with the 25-30 second load times of a level, this would not be my first pick if I want to play something while on the go. To give you a better view of the process of getting into a race, it goes as follows. The game boots into the Favorites area so you have to sluggishly make your way to the furthest area to the right, are forced to use the touch-screen here to scroll down with the bottom left UI, and then select a track to slowly load into. Career mode is the only place where we can earn objects and work our way to unlocking a bonus tour even if we lose a race. The first two modes do not contribute to that, making Career a more likely destination most of the time.
My complaining about rather pedantic things aside, here I am in 2021, still impressed by the graphical fidelity on display here. The reflections on each of the eight karts that race through the track, the object density of some maps, and those water effects are quite something. Sony wanted to showcase the Vita’s horsepower to make it look like a portable PS3. They succeeded. This was a launch title, and I still vividly remember an old friend excitedly showing it off while I opted for Wipeout 2048. There is just something about Road Trip’s colorful nature and stylized charm that really makes it pop. It does come at a cost, though. From what I can tell, Road Trip tries to hover around the 25fps mark, yet heavy drops are very common. It can affect your driving in heavier scenarios, making one wish they focused on having a consistent framerate instead. Lowering the visual fidelity or targeting a stable 20fps would have been preferable, in my opinion.
One of the first things the game will teach you if you have tutorials turned on is how to drift. This is a necessary function, not just an occasional thing to do. The further you drift during a single go, the more your Boost Meter fills up. Getting to a 5000 point drift will add a fire-like effect to your kart, significantly increasing your speed and giving you a quick burst of nitro when you let go. Learning how to hold a drift and cut corners efficiently will be vital sooner rather than later. This is not an easy game, nor is it very forgiving. One minor mistake will quickly see an opponent overtake you, and a crash is not an easy thing to recover from. The AI, for some reason, can drive faster than you. This means you won’t win by regular styled racing alone. You are going to have to constantly pull off some clutch maneuvers to come out on top.
Another important aspect is how you handle that Boost Meter. It is much more than just a way to activate nitro on demand. It can also be used as a defensive measure. By pressing O, you can raise a shield to protect you from any oncoming attacks. Raising it at the last moment is the most efficient use of it as it rapidly consumes your meter. On the other hand, just activating it takes up a large chunk. It may be better to hold it if you are not confident in your timing, rather than being forced to activate it twice. I adore this feature as it puts far more value on skill and avoids the cheap “blue shell” situations kart racers are infamous for. The only circumstances where you’ll be defenseless are when your boost meter runs try due to not drifting enough or poor usage. Even then, you are only helpless if you are in first place. In this situation, it may be better to slow down a bit to avoid all the heat of being in the lead.
You don’t have to solely rely on weapons when you want to go on the offensive. By moving the right analog stick to either direction, you can perform a side sweep to ram your kart into an opponent. It will down him with a single blow, as would any other weapon. The danger here is missing your side sweep. This attack puts a ton of weight behind your tail-end, which can easily cause you to lose control if it doesn’t impact an enemy kart. Enemies can and will do this too if given a chance, and there is no blocking a side sweep, only evading it. Close quarters combat is far riskier than fighting at a distance, granted you have some meter left to do so. There are seven weapons in total. They show up during races as colored balloons that randomly switch their colors after some time. All are one-use items, so if you miss, you’ll have to wait until you reach another bubble for another chance.
The interesting thing about the weapons is that they can be stacked. After you pick up a balloon, all future ones will be of the same color for your racer. This lets you build it to its maximum power after collecting three of them if you are patient. From the first stage to its third, it will include a different effect on your weapon. While the final stage of it does offer far more destructive potential and most add a tracking effect, a single shot of any weapon will down an opponent. It can be just as beneficial to use them as soon as you get them if you trust in your aim. Being hit or falling off the course will drain you of a balloon. If you only had one to begin with, then there goes your weapon. It is quite an in-depth system. Road Trip is the thinking man’s kart racer with how deep these mechanics are.
By clicking on your weapons icon via the touchscreen, it will remove it from your possession and convert it into an additional boost for your meter. It doesn’t grant enough that you couldn’t easily make from simply drifting for a while, though it is a nice emergency measure or a bonus for the more defensive player. The final thing you can do with your Boost Meter is just as important. There are sections throughout some stages where you need to sacrifice some of your meter to access a shortcut. With the chaos and how fast you’re moving, it can be easy to overlook the yellow circle planted on the floor that indicates this. If you do catch it in time or know it is there, you can choose to flick your right analog stick up to cast out an arc of energy using some of your boost meter. That shortcut will open up to give you quite the advantage over simply racing alongside the regular route.
Opening up a shortcut can be a risky ordeal as opponents can now go through it too. It’s best to time it right and be wary of any nearby karts that will want to side sweep you right off before reaching it. Timing is also important when someone else opens it, and you want to get through it too. If you reach it too late, it will promptly shut a gate in your face and cause you to wreck your kart at the speeds you are likely going at trying to get through it. When it comes down to it, what matters most is not your ability to take down foes but your skills staying alive while driving well. Road Trip is far from the type of game that would see you go from last place to first from a lucky item drop. You have to set everything in place yourself for that to happen and constantly plan ahead. It is not a party-based kart racer, ala Mario Kart.
As much as I love everything that has to do with racing and combat in Road Trip, there is one thing that majorly detracts from the experience. That is the abhorrent rubber-banding the AI possesses. There will always be another kart right up your tail-pipe, despite how much you take them down or try to get a significant lead on. You can be driving like if you were trying to go MLG, but opponents will still materialize out of nowhere to reach you. It is pretty frustrating getting a good advantage by making a risky maneuver only to look at the minimap as the AI mysteriously zooms right behind you. Remember, the AI also drives faster than you. If you mess up even slightly, they will overtake you after having za warudo’d right behind your kart. This makes using offensive measures largely useless and forces us to play defensively.
This same leisure is not afforded to the player should they fall behind by either crashing or being attacked. The enemies do slow down a tad, yet it is a real struggle getting back to first place only to then be back to square one when you return to the lead as the AI breathes down your neck. I have rarely seen rubber-banding this severe. It is to the point where it may as well be a game built around strict time-based checkpoints given how little room for error you have. Ultimately, I did enjoy the challenge it brought, though the blatant cheating on display is hardly a good feeling. Its method of having difficulty is worse than the fun the challenge brings. Having AI and rubber-banding like this does not make a player want to improve. Why would they even bother when something as simple as flubbing a drift a bit can see you overtaken no matter the lead you had or doing much better than last time. Having so many luck-based stage hazards in later levels will also peeve some people as the rubber-banding makes them not a threat for AI, only the player.
It was a mistake not allowing the player to choose a difficulty for the Career mode. What is on offer here will be too much to handle for a ton of people. According to the trophy system, only 6.4% of people have made it first place in the final tour. It is only 2.0% for the bonus sixth tour. This is not a problem anymore, but a ton of content would have been locked away from the creative gamers that want to make tracks. That is unless they pay for the $5.99 “DLC” to unlock all the cosmetics and track design objects. Remember when something like that would have just been a cheat code, or am I the crazy one here? In any case, the rubber-banding is undeniably cheap. I do no feel that it ruins the game, however. Road Trip is one of the most intense racing games I’ve played in years, though for entirely wrong reasons.
I was thoroughly satisfied having beat the fifth tour and overcoming what Road Tour threw at me. My only regret is not having the patience to unlock the bonus tour. It will certainly add more playtime to those dedicated enough to get it, but the requirements are pretty hefty. The closure of the servers are a real shame as well. That would have been an awesome thing to experience and made this title into one you’d never want to delete from your Vita due to countless user-made tracks to drive in. In its current state, it is still serviceable with the content it does offer. While flawed, I am overall happy with what I played to the point that a sequel to expand on its potential would be a system seller for me. ModNation Road Tour remains a standout title despite the server closure killing off so many aspects. It is a fun vehicular combat game that fans of high difficulty will enjoy and one of the few titles still exclusive to the Vita. With a current digital price tag of $13.49, it is even more compelling to try, even just for curiosity’s sake.
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