MANTIS BURN RACING
Weird name, good game
Think the golden days of top-down racers are in the past? The likes of Circuit Breakers, Micro Machines and Mashed are now almost specks in the rearview mirror, but don’t mistake this spiritual successor for a mere throwback.
Gone are silly staples such as power-ups, 1 wacky courses and instant gratification. Instead we get a more rewarding style of racing that focuses on the joy of speed, drifting and customisation. Career mode is where the bulk of the action takes place, with an intriguing blend of RPG style progression and fast, arcadey blasts of racing. There are eight different types of events, from the last-place-elimination of Knockout to the tense Accumulation, where you earn points quicker the higher up the standings you are. Not only do you need to win races, but side objectives – such as reaching a certain high speed – add depth to each battle and help unlock upgrades to either buy new cars or upgrade the ones you have. It’s an overwhelming amount of stuff for a game that doesn’t really need it, but short races, strong handling and a distinct sense of speed combine to make the early going relatively compulsive.
What lets it down is the lack of variety in design. There are only two locations, Sand Town and New Shangri-la, and while both have a multitude of different tracks, there are so many races you’ll soon tire of trundling through the same environments. Still, you do get four-player split-screen and eight-player online races to keep things fresh, making this a serious reinvention of top-down racing, and one that deserves to be taken for a spin. 2