There's another more important reason to gain boost however, and that is your shield. Your shield is what will protect you from attacks, but it only stays up as long as you have boost available and as long as you hold down the circle button. The shield itself will eat through your available boost like the Cookie Monster eats, you guessed it, Cookies, the real challenge here is trying to time the shield to go up just before you get hit, and it's a lot harder than it sounds. Getting hit can be a real deal breaker, sometimes you'll get hit and spin out, other times your kart will blow up and send you flying across the track, the best advice you'll hear is don't get hit.
Further on in your race career through the ModNation Championship the races and challenges become much more difficult, but you'll also have gained invaluable experience on how to play both offensively and defensively. Each of the races you participate in can be followed by a challenge, these put you up against a single opponent which you must defeat, in a variety of different ways. These can involve a simple race against one opponent and his goons, or a drifting challenge where the highest score wins. These are optional in your progress but they unlock the karts and suits you see the opponent wearing. That said, each of the races comes with three challenges which vary to some degree, usually most involve coming first, others include taking down a specific opponent during a race, others will require a set amount of points, each of these that get completed unlocks more content in the Creation Station for you to use.
The real star of the show is the creation tools you're gifted with, the more items you unlock through the ModNation Championship, the more you have to play with. You can practically make any type of character you want, we've already seen the likes of Kratos, Mario, and a multitude of others racing around the ModSpot, and the karts are equally as customisable, allowing you to choose specific wheels, bodies, engines, and more, then of course you have to paint it and adorn it with stickers and shapes. It's just a matter of time before you see all your favourite videogame characters racing through the ModSpot, personally, I'm looking forward to some Wacky Races characters and The Muppets, but copyright may get in the way of any creations you might have in mind, much like when LittleBigPlanet launched, certain levels were removed due to copyright infringement, we'll just have to see if ModNation Racers goes down the same path and the men in black suits come out to play.
The level creator unlike other games is a real joy to use, it's extremely simple to get to grips with and you can do as much, or as little of the work as possible. Laying down your track is a simple affair, you're given control of something similar to a combine harvester and you simply drive around in whatever direction you want the track to go adjusting the inclination on the fly. If you should go over any track you have placed on a higher plane then the game automatically builds a bridge in its place, so you don't have to fiddle with the specifics.
Once your happy that your track is in place then you have two options, populate the track yourself with numerous amounts of decoration, place the power-ups, the boost points, and jumps, or have the game do it automatically. You can literally have a well-designed track up and running within a few minutes, then you can test it out before publishing it for you and your friends to race on, or share it with the rest of the world. Each of your submissions can be commented and voted on, or reported, should you feel the need to create something that looks like a giant genitalia, yes, it will happen, hopefully however, it's something you'll never get to see.
Up till now, ModNation Racers is the all signing and all dancing game PlayStation 3 fans have been waiting for, but it does have two points which provide a negative to all this positive. The first being a large installation size, something which isn't un-common on the PlayStation 3. The other is the long load times, something which is bearable, to some degree. Everywhere you go in the ModSpot includes a load screen, and they roughly take around a minute depending on where you go, you get to read some handy tips while waiting for the percentage to finally reach 100% but after so long, you've seen them all and you already know them. What's disappointing is the fact that you sacrifice such a large amount of space on the hard drive for what seems like no benefit whatsoever. Do not however let these two minor points put you off the fun you can have with ModNation Racers, it is entirely possible that United Front Games simply patch the game code and improve the load times, something we'll have to hope for.
So in conclusion ModNation Racers is not only a fantastic kart racer, it's a staple to its genre, and the evolution of what it has aspired to be. With its deep customisation which adds limitless possibilities and infinite replayability where there's always something new to see or race on, making ModNation Racers one of the best Kart racing games since when the original Mario Kart came out for the SNES back in 1992. If you have even a slight interest in ModNation Racers then you should definitely pick it up, it's a game that's going to define any future kart racing games we've yet to see.
