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LittleBigPlanet Karting Review

Play. Create. Swear.

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ModNation Racers had great potential. The track editor was a resounding success, offering an incredibly user-friendly toolset, with plenty of additional depth on offer to create anything you could conjure up in your mind. Sadly, the racing wasn’t up to the same standards. It handled well enough, but the relentless AI meant a never-ending stream of races where you’d be leading until the last corner, then get your ass blown apart and finish fifth.

Playing online with user-generated tracks provided a fairer experience, but XP rewards were essentially non-existent unless using the original tracks, giving you no incentive to play. Lengthy load times made the game a failure for local multiplayer party sessions too.

LittleBigPlanet Karting

Despite replicating these issues with the recent Vita version, developer United Front Games have been given a lifeline as Sony have handed them the keys to work on new crossover kart-racer, LittleBigPlanet Karting. With a large part of the game already built with the aforementioned ModNation Racers, it made sense to use many of those existing elements to gain a head start.

Before getting stuck into the track editor and user-generated stages, I went into the story mode to try out the UFG levels. There’s a story, which is about as superfluous as they come. I’m a gamer who hates skipping cutscenes, but I couldn’t bear to carry on watching most of this kooky, babbling bullsh*t. Even as a LBP regular, I reached my limit in record time. As much as I like Stephen Fry, he did my head in with his bedtime story-esque dithering that preceded every event.

Stages are split between races and arena events. Races are very basic karting fare. Drifting gains you boost upon releasing the button and the amount of the movability during a drift was pleasing enough as you’re not as locked into a curve as much as say, Mario Kart. Multiple stages of boost are built up, signified by as brief flash and an audio cue, however, the exhaust glow is always the same colour making it difficult to keep track of how much you’ve accrued. Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing nailed drifting and boosting and UFG should have been taking notes.

Weapons are integral to the success of a kart racing and sadly, LBP Karting has a collection of duds and blanks. At no point did I get that surge of excitement on getting a weapon from the random pickups, as no clear favourite stood out for me. In this game, a weapon’s main function is defence. When you’re about to be hit, a warning icon will turn to a shield, fire backwards and you’ll deflect the weapon successfully. Sadly, weapon pick-ups on most tracks are miserably rare, meaning you’ll defend one only to have another on your ass before you’re able to pick up another weapon. The rubber-banded AI means that you’re always surrounded by the pack and most weapons lock on. So without one, you will be hit, especially on that last corner.

LittleBigPlanet Karting

There’s a casual setting to appease the frustrated amongst us, but like the late-patched casual option in ModNation, it appears to be a painted-on feature with no impact on the little f**kers accuracy or malevolence. You’re better off with the normal setting as your scores will not be uploaded to the leaderboards on casual.

Arena events fare much better, but they only make up about a quarter of the story mode. Here you’ll often find yourself in a deathmatch using the weapons to score one-hit kills. The action is thankfully more balanced here. Other modes can include CTF-style modes where you grab an egg with your tether and drag it to a scoring zone or a retrotastic chase where you fire a rapid-laser at a giant worm, blasting chunks from its tail against the clock.

The fun for these arena games is short-lived, but that’s where going online comes into play. Completing story stages unlocks online versions and additional minigames. These are much more fun with real people than the bots. One of my criticisms from the LBP series carries on here too though, as the navigation of events is as crude as ever. Looking around spherical menus is an awkward mess, making me feel like a senile cat trying to play with a ball of yarn.

So far, so frustrating, but onto the track editor to make some fun of my own. Large portions will be familiar to ModNation players. You simply drive and steer to lay down a track, using analogue sticks to adjust the gradient. Afterwards you can go back and tweak sections of track, by narrowing or widening them, or changing the road surface. Adding traps, pickups and side-routes is also refreshingly simple. When it comes to populating the outside of tracks with buildings, objects, hills or weather it becomes apparent that the experience isn’t as smooth as it used to be. LBP’s popit menus are often vague and the labelling isn’t as clear as ModNation’s. With a bit of faff though, you’ll be able to pick things up eventually.

The kart editor has gone missing though. Yes, you can create anything as a kart for the game using unlockable objects; you simply have to attach a kart base to the bottom of them. This feature is buried in the track editor though, there’s no standalone editor in the Pod hub. You can change a few features on unlocked carts from the Pod though, like seats, horns or ready-made shells, but you can’t change any colours. It’s a huge backwards step from what UFG started with.

LittleBigPlanet Karting

Going into the Community menu is where you can find stages created by other players. Essentially, where you’d expect to spend most of your time. When looking through the already impressive numbers of tracks out there, I struggled to find ones where people were actually playing them online as the huge number of tracks means a stretched audience. So, I generally had to play against bots, which of course meant dealing with the same AI issues as in the story mode. Quick match options also only sent me to UFG-created tracks.

Browsing the highest rated stages yielded more populated races, allowing me to try out a stage with a cow-launcher (instantly better than all of UFG’s weapons), and an arena based in a submarine with shifting battle zones as water filled the lower levels. As with any create-mode in an average game, people attempt to replicate the experience of better games, so it’s no surprise to already see loads of Mario Kart tracks -a damn good job people have made of them too. When seeing the variety of tracks thrown together already from the community, I can’t help but think that the developers have let themselves down. Aside from a few alternate routes opening up on later laps, their tracks are a real bore compared to the user-generated content. Which, makes it a massive shame that you’re going to play most of these new stages on your own, unless you can gather a regular group of players to play with, as playing the game solo is a miserably thankless ordeal.

Even trying the find stages isn’t particularly easy. When using the ‘battle’ or ‘minigame’ tag to search for non-race events, the game kept putting me into races. When given the choice of voting for the next event after finishing another, the game only provides options from the story mode, rather than a random selection from the community.

LittleBigPlanet Karting

The game could grow on me, if I can drum up the enthusiasm to go back to it. But let’s put it this way, the most enjoyment I got from it was discovering a Peggle-style game that some genius had created. Created with an engine made to make racing games and arena battles. Impressive, but you may as well play LittleBigPlanet 2 instead.

Another area the game falls down compared to the competition and again, ModNation, is the visuals. LBP has never been a looker, but as a kart-racer, with 3D environments, its kitch 2D cardboard cut-out style is bland, flat and boring throughout - you’ve scraped more attractive inspiration off your couch after a party. The colours are depressingly washed out too compared to recent releases like F1 Race Stars and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, the latter being where I’d recommend set your karting sat-nav to instead.

Our ratings for LittleBigPlanet Karting on PlayStation 3 out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)
Presentation
47
Visually dated compared to the competition and the story is a mess of ugly and boring cutscenes. Level navigation is the same clunky mess as the LBP games too.
Gameplay
55
Makes the same mistakes as ModNation Racers with merciless AI. The weapons fail to ignite your revenge flame either as you're forced to use them in a defensive capacity.
Single Player
50
More of a tutorial for different modes with a story to forget. The minigames fare much better than the races though.
Multiplayer
65
Once you get a regular group to play with, exploring the user-generated stages can be great fun, depending on the talent of the person who designed it. However, quiet servers mean you may find yourself stuck playing with the AI on these stages.
Performance
60
"Could not connect for some reason" is not a valid excuse for repeatedly failing to connect to a game. A temperamental issue that randomly comes and goes at will. Patchable.
Overall
58
Racing against the AI is a miserable experience in a game that trails the pack visually and in terms of raw entertainment and fun. Take it online and there are some great tracks and minigames designed by the community although connecting for multiplayer is harder than it should be. If you can find a consistent group to play with though, there's fun to be had beneath the layers of frustration.
Comments
LittleBigPlanet Karting
LittleBigPlanet Karting box art Platform:
PlayStation 3
Our Review of LittleBigPlanet Karting
58%
Mediocre
The Verdict:
Game Ranking
LittleBigPlanet Karting is ranked #1710 out of 1957 total reviewed games. It is ranked #131 out of 145 games reviewed in 2012.
1709. Final Fantasy XIII-2
PlayStation 3
1710. LittleBigPlanet Karting
1711. Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two
PlayStation 3
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Screenshots

LittleBigPlanet Karting
12 images added Dec 5, 2012 21:20
Videos
LittleBigPlanet Karting - Gamescom Tr...
Posted: Aug 20, 2012 22:51
LittleBigPlanet Karting - Story Trailer
Posted: Oct 20, 2012 15:42
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