There’s a career mode and standalone single-player races alongside the limited multiplayer options, but none of them are very enthralling. When it comes time to finally race, Road Trip provides the bare minimum required to qualify as a videogame. While it’s not quite as sluggish as attempting to download pornography on a dial-up connection, it’s a significant, consistent issue that’s hard to ignore. Whether choosing a new helmet for one’s racer or browsing the available paint jobs for a new car body, there’s a marked delay between making a selection and getting a response. Road Trip‘s creation options are further held back by prominent input lag that infests every single menu item. When it comes to making anything else, more traditional controls will always work better. By far, it by works best in track building, where the power to grow mountains by pressing behind the Vita system is intuitive and rather inspiring. This new input works in some situations - such as drawing out a race track in real-time by touch alone - although the small, densely populated menus and difficulty in seeing where an object is being placed under one’s hand can result in frustration and inconvenience, making the interface come off as needlessly forced in place of adequate button commands. Head-to-head online racing was such a big part of ModNation Racers that its exclusion is puzzling at best and a glaring lack of effort at worst.Ĭustomization is done using the touch screen, allowing players to browse the many menus and to apply colorful stickers using their fingers. When it comes to multiplayer competition, the best players can do is download time trial data from others (either online or through NEAR) and race against their ghosts. The world of Road Trip is a linear and restricted one, consisting of a series of almost static screens in which players access community content, build their own racers, and run a variety of solo challenges or local multiplayer races. In fact, head-to-head online multiplayer has been scrapped altogether. Gone are the vast online hub world and sense of exploration that stood out as the original’s strongest features.

While fellow Vita title Uncharted: Golden Abyss uses the system’s powerful hardware to present an authentic console experience, Road Trip uses the handheld medium as an excuse to be as flat and flavorless as possible.

ModNation Racers: Road Trip is notably stripped down from the very beginning.

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