We love a good beta test and we can’t say we’ve been involved in one that was much more impressive than that offered by Sony and United Front Games for ModNation Racers last month. While severely trimmed down from the full experience we’re expecting, there was still a ridiculous amount packed into this teaser for the upcoming play, create and share title which is intended to pick up where LittleBigPlanet left off. The big difference is that ModNation Racers is a far more accessible and understandable game for those unfamiliar with design to get in to.

Mud splatter will build up on the karts as you race around – as you can see.

How ModNation Racers seems to be achieving this is through the simple fact that it’s a karting game and therefore requires very little in the way of puzzle creation or narrative and the interface is superbly simple. In just a few hours of play we created several tracks with vastly different layouts and challenges, all of which were great fun to play. We can only begin to imagine how much better they could have been with the full catalogue of features and tools the final game will offer.

Creating a track is where it all starts, first driving your kart around a blank canvas of a base world to set your start/finish line and then driving the course in a tarmac-laying machine. You can create bridges, make spiralling towers of track, vicious hairpins and steering this machine does it all. That automatically makes every track you could create plausible. You’ve driven it to create it so you must be able to pass it when it’s finished. And once you get down to the fine detail you can really start to have some fun with it, too.

There are so many little details to play with when creating a track it almost boggles the mind. Quite apart from the shape and layout of the track you can also edit and create surface types, barriers, trackside buildings, shortcuts, mountains, lakes, rivers, animals, the position of the sun and cloud cover, the placing of pickups, boost pads and moveable objects. With all these tools at your disposal the options really seem limitless and when you try out some of United Front’s own tracks you can see how much more will be possible in the final game.

The Modspot is the central hub of the game and is full of community updates.

Much like LittleBigPlanet, everything in the pre-made tracks will be available to you in the final game. That means placing huge stunt jumps and a winding wooden slate track should all be possible. United Front’s circuits are a great inspiration to take back with you to the Creation Station, helping you think about the best ways to make use of shortcuts and power-up placements. But most importantly the interface for creating all these things is simple and intuitive. There’s a lot of back and forth in the menus at the minute, having to re-select the last menu you accessed rather than starting there, but it remains easy to navigate.

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