review
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POSTED 28/10/16


MANTIS BURN RACING

VooFoo Studios



Expectantly crouched at the starting line, engines pumping and thumping in time...

It isn’t a lie, we’ve probably poached from Cake before (MMMmmm...Cake!) But that’s not important right now. What is important is that we have a top down multiplayer racer reminiscent of Super Sprint, Micro Machines and MotorStorm: RC to play with. Yay!

It’s not what we expected from the VooFoo folk, who usually give us shiny inside-the-house things like balls, cards and chess pieces. The graphics here aren’t as drop dead stunning as in their previous efforts, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

You want modes? You got ’em. The career one is the most chunkalicious, with seven seasons to trundle through, with difficulty ramping as you tackle eight different modes. No problem though, for you earn upgrades to your vehicles, which follow a sort of three bears principle in that there’s light and nimble, something in the middle and the big bruiser that looks like a fish and moves like a fish but steers like a cow.

RING! RING!

Shit, that’ll be Douglas Adams’ lawyers again...

Right, we’d best be quick then. There’s also up to four player local split-screen multiplayer, online and even weekly challenges.

Handling is dreamy, not suffering from any of the confusion as to where to point that games like those mentioned above sometimes delivered, as here the screen rotates with you.

On the downshift... erm, downside, as well as the aforementioned non-shiny visuals the music grates after a short while, the car sounds are wussy, the feeling of speediness takes until later levels to kick in and there are only two basic backgrounds (where occasionally you have close to NFI where to go) – dirty and city. Free updates are promised, so hopefully some more variety will be (fuel) injected sooner rather than later.

Mantis Burn Racing is rather cool, but it doesn’t quite take the Cake.

DLC UPDATE 7/4/17
Two new DLC packs have just hit – one free, one for a few bucks.

The former is the Snowbound Pack, which adds four very, very white – and very, very challenging - tracks. For free. There’s no complaining about that. There’s also no complaining about the 34 extra events it adds to single player.

Meanwhile, drop a few bucks and you can buy some class. Well, you can buy the ‘Elite’ class. Rather than adding space trading as some may expect, it brings a decidedly WipeOut vibe to proceedings, with pointy, hovery, bumpy track-avoiding vehicular action. Solo players will also dig the very challenging 12 events that have been shoehorned in to show off their pointy-pointy mastery.

take me back to the start...

 



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ALL WRITTEN CONTENT COPYRIGHT © AMY FLOWER 2008-2018. GAME IMAGES COURTESY OF RESPECTIVE GAMES COMPANIES.