Vertex Interactive

Modnation Racer Preview

// December 16th, 2009 // games

Release:   TBA 2010

You start by molding the terrain. Basically, you select how you want to raise or lower the earth with a simple tool that lets you select the size or type of mountain or valley you want to make. From there, it’s the fun part: laying track. You basically pretend like you’re flying a slow-moving plane that leaves a streak of asphalt behind you. You use flight controls–tilt up and down, roll side to side, and so on–to determine the basic lay of the track as you guide yourself along and eventually meet back up with the first bit of asphalt to complete it. What’s cool is that you can either choose to have the asphalt snap to current terrain or let yourself float freely and automatically raise or lower the mountains and valleys you’d previously design to fit with your current track. If it sounds complicated, don’t worry: it’s really simple.

After that, you can elect to change the type of road and roadside decorations out there manually, or let the game “auto-populate” your track with the best obstacles and boosts it can think of. I went with the latter option, and it worked out for me quite well. The game is really smart about how it inserts stuff onto your track, automatically laying down speed boosts to help you up really steep inclines and adding arrows to indicate a sharp turn coming up ahead. But even if you auto-populate your track, you can still go in and manually tweak everything. I added cows and sheep crossing the track behind a blind curve to give my AI opponents a good fright. I also added a litany of hazards like a flame pit and a giant crusher that drops a huge piston right onto the track at random intervals, or when you attach it to a nearby pressure pad. You can tweak all these obstacles to determine the frequency at which they rough up the drivers and other sorts of variables. For the most part, the menus used to adjust these settings are pretty clean and simple, relying on radial layouts that keep you from scrolling too much.