Roadtrip forgoes the humor and personality it forged on the console to go for a collection of events similar to the more serious Wipeout series, and it’s a definite loss for the franchise. The original had a silly storyline surrounding the player’s rise to greatness. In addition to the notable absence of the commentators for this outing, the career mode consists of picking various events and competing in them, rather than any sense of narrative progression. Perhaps because Sony San Diego decided this was a portable game, the campaign, or career mode is also a much more truncated version of its console counterpart. It’s an unfortunate technical gaffe, because when the touch features work, they actually work very well, there’s just an unreliability to how long they’ll keep working so smoothly before things start to lag for no apparent reason. But suddenly that responsiveness can take a nose dive as background loading or processing occurs. For basic navigation and some aspects of creation, the poking and pinching functions are as smooth and responsive as you’d expect from a tablet or smartphone. The implementation of touch features was expected, but the performance of the touch screen is unpredictable, again, due to technical issues.
Roadtrip also fails to really take advantage of all the potential it has. That kind of performance dip is always problematic in any kind of racing game where timing is everything. While it looks just like the original, more hectic races with a lot of attacking can put a visible strain on the game, with hits to the frame rate. The game starts showing its portable limitations in the performance department, unfortunately. The graphics are comparable-if not outright equal-to its console counterpart. Like other Vitified games before it, ModNation Racers: Roadtrip has some impressive visuals for handheld software.
Most surprisingly of all, the ability to upload those tracks and download tracks from the existing online collection of the console cousin has made it into this game, so players can never complain about a lack of content, as long as they have online access.
Players can create a “mini-fig” that acts as their driver, create a kart, and even create the tracks that the kart racing occurs on. ModNation Racers: Roadtrip is portable version of the game best known for being a mash up between Mario Kart and LittleBigPlanet. The migration actually does a lot of things right and at an impressive level of quality, but there are a few feature issues that keep this from being a safe, easy “must buy” title for the Vita. ModNation Racers: Roadtrip is another title added to the list of console franchises subjected to the “Vitafication” process, shrinking down to Sony’s newest portable wonder. Sony may not be particularly imaginative with its launch line up of games, but it is making safe, successful choices.
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