E3: ModNation Racers Preview

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As with the rest of the game, although you can work with a broad brush for your first pass, it's a very simple process to then highlight individual objects and move or delete them, and the landscape tools wisely work around the track itself, meaning if you accidentally draw over the tarmac as you're planting forestry, ModNation will know not to put a Douglas Fir in the middle of your hairpin bend. Each landscape also has its own themed objects, and so within a few seconds of messing around with the mountainous backdrop, our developer had set up some nice Swiss chalets and a thick forest of pines. Enough to make you think of investing in a timeshare, really.

Being a kart racer, there's also a range of weapon drops to deploy, each of which can be laid down and then subsequently altered as necessary. United Front isn't willing to say much about what to expect so far, but we're shown some simple missiles, and a more complex system of collectable triggers - pick-ups that will allow you to squash enemies under a block, say, or open up a personal shortcut.

Building a fairly elaborate track, with a central lake, roadside houses, weaponry, and even an odd spray of wildflowers over the dusty sections (being the last day of E3, and the eight millionth runthrough of the demo, it's entirely possible our developer had long since lost his mind) takes a skilled player around 10 minutes, by the look of it, and jumping into it for a quick test circuit - a process which handily spawns some AI partners - reveals a speedy and confident racer, filled with explosive takedowns and plenty of physics chaos as karts smash into tyre walls and bounce off each other.

'Smackable' objects like dustbins and bales of hay - I can't read my notes, so I may be making these examples up - can be stuck onto the track to add to the chaos.

Away from the track, there's a wealth of vehicle and avatar design options, ranging from the ability to tweak everything from your engine type to the size and location of your character's nose. Racers themselves are based on the vinyl toy scene, an easy way of ensuring a strong sense of continuity between characters, while allowing a nice variety of customisations, and it's a lot more successful than the often slightly anonymous look of the landscapes and textures themselves. By no means ugly, ModNation's world has the slight blandness of a PC RTS from a few years ago, and while the approach will doubtless be less divisive than the patchwork handicraft stylings of LittleBigPlanet, the game may struggle to make much of a name for itself visually.