Little Big Planet Karting Review

United Front Games was the development house behind the extremely fun ModNation Racers, a karting game that allowed the player to not only race along some awesome tracks against AI and human opponents, but also to get their creative juices flowing with tons of modding and track building options. Only one game in SCE’s stable had more modding options and community based activities: LittleBigPlanet. So the choice to get United Front and LBP developers Media Molecule working on a karting game set in the LBP universe not only made sense, but also promised to deliver an extremely entertaining game. Sadly, this promise was never realised; not only is LittleBigPlanet Karting a mediocre karting title, but all that potential for awesome community built tracks and vehicles simply never got realised.

On the surface, this is a rather bland karting game. It takes some ideas from ModNation Racers and implements them, but leaves some of the better ideas out. The result is a racer that feels like a stripped down version of ModNation, except this time it’s populated with SackBoys.

And the racing gets extremely frustrating. A highly elastic AI is combined with a weapon system that feels like an afterthought. Instead of being able to defend with a handy refilling meter, like in ModNation, this title requires the player to use the single weapon they can carry for either defensive or offensive purposes. This means that the player will be defenceless more often than not, and the AI opponents (never mind human competitors) are not above taking numerous cheap shots at the player. The end result is tons of frustration.

A major part of the game play is gathering score bubbles and gift bubbles, much like the previous LBP games. But this detracts from the racing, and the player wanting to maximise their creative potential by unlocking lots of stuff will more often than not lose the race because they were trying to get gift bubbles. At the end of each race, the overall score also awards new prizes.

Overall, the tracks are bland and uninspiring affairs… which make the idea of building your own tracks so appealing. But the toolset is clunkier than it should be, even though it has a few intuitive ideas worked in to it. Automatic population of details and decorations, like in ModNation, is absent here. That frustration, combined with a number of bugs, makes building tracks less fun than it should be. It’s not particularly difficult to create a track, but it feels a little too involved and time consuming.

Despite having a handful of game modes (including arena based free-for-alls) and having sack-loads of potential, LittleBigPlanet Karting simply does not develop into what it could, or should, have been. The racing is not engaging thanks to high degrees of frustration, the included tracks are few and plain, and the modding aspect simply should have been better. The multiplayer is fun, but menus are confusing, and the attack and defence system are just as bad as in single player. The combination of ideas lifted from to strong franchises has resulted in a game that in inferior to both.

Developer: United Front
Publisher: SCEE
Distributer: Ster Kinekor