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.