Review: Mantis Burn Racing

It seems reviews of top down racers have a customary nod to Micro Machines in their first few paragraphs.  Mantis Burn Racing deserves better, though, it’s more akin to those classics that came before the toy car racer, Super Sprint is certainly a more likely spiritual ancestor.

This is a game that treats its cars and levels seriously,even if some of those cars look like they come from the near future.  The tracks have an amazing sense of detail to them when you crank up the resolution and it’s as fun to watch as to play.

You start the game with a single car and the only option here is to change the colour. The mechanic character, there to introduce you to each aspect of the game, points you towards the first race, a typical top 3 event, and off you go.  There’s not much more to the basic racing than this.

Drifting is the key, here. All tracks are designed with a mix of long, sweeping corners and tight bends, all which need to be navigated as fast as possible. There is a brake but I often felt the game didn’t really want me to use it as the occasional bump into scenery slowed me down far better and with less need to accelerate again once I got back on the straight.

It’s not just about getting first place, though, even in these basic races. As you race you’ll get points for knocking down obstacles, taking jumps at top speed and doing longer drifts or even for overtaking. At the end of each race you’ll get awarded ‘gears’ for winning a race but also for random tasks, a little like many mobile games now provide, such as a super long drift or doing a certain amount of damage. The winning part is certainly important as it opens up the next races to you in Career mode, but gears are the key to upgrading your car with extra parts and generally making progress off the track.

Career is where you’ll most likely spend the bulk of your time in the game, at least at first. There are time trials, knock outs and accumulators (where you’ll need to reach 1000 points and being in first place nets you the most points) as well as the standard races. They follow a now well-worn linear path with the occasional block where you’ll need to earn a certain amount of gears before you continue, forcing you to go back at times and improve your score.

Aside from this there’s a standard single and multiplayer offline mode, all wrapped up in one and a multiplayer, which doesn’t seem to have a lot of traffic at the moment, unfortunately.  These modes all have the same options where you can choose the game mode and car types but, strangely, not the tracks themselves.  The game gives you a randomly assigned track each time.

While you’ll notice lots of different routes (or, more accurately, some routes and mirrors of these) they’re all set against the same few backgrounds that are just repeated.  It would have been nice to have more variety in the scenarios the game winds its roads around, however lovely the current ones look.  There are a few issues with some of these backgrounds getting in the way of the race track, too, especially in the city at dusk when it’s hard enough to see your car already.  High rise buildings can obscure your view as you twist around corners, leaving you driving blind at times.

Mantis Burn Racing is a solid game with some fun gameplay but it falls down on variety of tracks and cars and on long term gameplay.

Mantis Burn Racing

6.5

Overall

6.5/10

Pros

• Great graphics
• Lovely track detail
• Good handling
• Interesting points system

Cons

• Not much variety in track locations
• Needs more content
• Light on different cars