Straight to the point: Mario Kart it ain’t. This is a marriage between Modnation Racers and Little Big Planet, where the latter clearly wears the trousers. It has great creative elements but sadly the racing is mediocre.

Trailer: 

Review:

It appears that karting games are like buses, there’s not been any for a good while and now 3 turn up at once; F1 Race Stars, Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed and Little Big Planet Karting have all been released within the same month (Oct/Nov 2012). LBP is has only been known for platforming until now, so does it prove itself as a racing game? Well, let’s take a look at how it all works…

Little Big Planet Karting is a marriage between Modnation Racers and the LBP games by Modnation Racers Developer, United Front. Many of the racing elements have been taken from Modnation Racers but have taken the theme and game structure of LPB and combined the creation tools of both games. But does this marriage work?

As with the LBP games, you start off in a cardboard hub and create the look of your sackboy and this time, your kart. The single player campaign is a story mode, just without much story and is broken up into different planets. Each planet has a theme based on level from the LBP games, comprised of races, mini games/challenges and battle levels.

As with the other LBP games, completing a level and achieving a podium position unlocks the next one, plus a mini-game; and it goes on until you unlock them all. There are around 70 of these levels to play on so there’s a fair bit of content here, and all of these contain collectible prizes to customise your character and kart, plus to add to your collection of items to use in create mode. The problem with this structure is that, although it is consistent with the LBP structure, it doesn’t really work for a racing game; what LBPK is really lacking is tournaments and cups.The mini-games often involve shooting something and just seem to be there to fill out the game and fit the LBP theme; more tracks and less of these would be better though.

On to the actual racing: as I said before, this has taken heavily from Modnation Racers, but has it improved on it? Not really. Quite a few elements have been stripped from it (the ones, which set it apart from the competition, and it seems it’s just to keep within the theme of LBP. It’s kept the drifting but now you need to release the button in order to get an instant boost, rather than building up a meter from drifting and using the boost when you want. There’s also no drafting and this is maybe because in MNR it was something, which gave you points and in this game you have point pickups instead.
The weapon pickup stacking hasn’t been included but the weapon defence has, which does really help the gameplay as you need to master the timing in order to defend yourself from incoming attacks. One new addition is swinging using grapple points but this doesn’t really add much to the experience and I’d rather see more of the aforementioned elements of MDR. What is better is that it’s easier to play than MDR, which could be pretty tough as it had a steep difficulty curve, which made it easy to put down. LBPK’s normal difficulty isn’t too dissimilar to this but it does also have an easier setting, which you can switch to if you get frustrated ; good for younger and less experienced players.

There is an overuse of rocket-based weapons but this time the attributes of most of them are suspiciously like the Mario Kart weapons. One is a homing rocket, like the red shell, another ricochets off the sides of the tracks until it hits someone, just like the green shell, and then there’s one, which homes in on the lead kart, like the spiky blue shell does. Then there’s race changes like the FFW pickup, which is basically a mushroom,(though I must say I love the FFW effect) and there’s a boxing glove, which is just like the bullet in Mario Kart Wii, just less impressive.

What it doesn’t take from Mario Kart, but should have at least taken notes from, is the track design. Frankly LBPK’s tracks can be quite dull, with short cuts on some tracks but there’s no real gamble on taking them, for example, Mario Kart Wii has tracks, where taking certain short cuts may save time or lead to a much needed pickup but the path will have hazards or is trickier to navigate through.
LBPK doesn’t really have that. There’s the odd chasm you need to grapple hook across, a few short cuts and hazards but the tracks are generally quite bland and none of them are that memorable.

Your kart can be customised, using materials you have picked up; the look and type of vehicle can be changed but this doesn’t seem to change the attributes of kart; it’s always a standard one. One of the great features in Mario Kart was being able to select a kart, which suited your play style best and this would have been a good addition to LBPK.

Both the graphical style and the soundtrack are exactly what you would expect from a LPK game and I can’t fault them. What makes this game really shines though, is the creative element, combining tools and materials from both MNR and LBP. The track building tool, taken from MDR, is very easy to use as you can lay down the track whilst driving your character around and with a simple tilt of the left stick you can create a bend and titling the right stick creates a slope.

There is an abundance of objects available to get creative with. How many depends on what you’ve collected during the single player races, which usually gives you a reason to play through them all again. You can spend hours populating your track with all kinds of objects, forming hills and lakes in the background etc and you can test it out anytime so you can go back and tweak it to perfection. Once it’s finished, it can be published online for others to enjoy and you can browse and play tracks made by others. And the creative tools are not just limited to building race tracks either; it’s possible to create simple shooters, puzzle games and other game types too. This is what LBP is all about.

Multiplayer consists of a race mode and a battle mode and needs to be accessed via the story mode. Basically you can only join a race for a particular track if you have reached a podium position on that track in the single player, which sucks. However, once you’ve joined a race, you can stay online and play whatever track loads next.

I haven’t played online since the first weekend after its release as there weren’t many other players online; and if there weren’t many then, it’s unlikely there will be now. However, if there is a lack of players, bots will be added automatically, which helps fill out a race but sometimes there only bots and you might as well just stick to the single player mode. Multiplayer also lacks any unlocks or profile levelling; something, which shouldn’t really be that important but gamers expect features like this these days.

Overall, I think United Front have focused too much on making a LBP game and not enough on making a decent racing games. It seems to me that some great features of their previous racing game seem to have been stripped, simply because they don’t fit in with the whole LBP them and I think this its downfall. However, I think most LBP planet fans will enjoy it and will be satisfied with the great creative elements.