I have been in the beta for a short time and while my overall initial impressions are pretty positive. I'm not sure how I like having so much of the interface online; but it seems to work pretty well. Also, the load times are a little crazy; but this is a beta after all.
The only thing that is a bit concerning is that fact that currently most of the program(the career mode is locked) runs on the PS3 hard drive but when the game comes out it will run off the disk. The fact that now, the game has horrendous load times running off the hard drive concerns me a little.
The only area of the game that is open is the online racing. You can either race in ranked or non-ranked matches. At present rankings and ranked matches seem a little unnecessary and other than one or two unlockables there isn't much difference between someone racing with a non-ranked profile and a rank 3 profile. The matchmaking is non-existent. The fact that someone who is ranked 3 will routinely race with people who are rank 1 or not ranked at all is a bit of a problem. This might be hard to understand as all of the changes to your kart are cosmetic; however knowing the track in this game is probably about 60% of winning. Also, understanding how the game works and power ups work are probably the rest of the 100% to winning. Hopefully the game will ship with more than the current 3 tracks and I don't mean 6. Considering ranking up unlocks things it is hard to see very many people playing the unranked player tracks until the game is out for a while. The fact that everyone is basically racing on a level playing field it would be hard to believe that people will want to do anything but online ranked matches. They might fool around on the user made tracks but the majority of their time will be spent on the approved ranked tracks. Considering the biggest part of the game is SUPPOSED to be racing on user made tracks this could be an issue.
Without the career mode most of the game's customization content is locked. More than three quarters of it in fact. Which makes the game difficult to discuss as far as how fun or not fun the game will be when it comes out. Even though the karts and characters share the same editor; both seem equally easy to make even if they are just a little irregular. Once you get the hang of the controls, you can certainly make quite a lot of things even with limited resources. There seem to be a few conventions that cannot be broken. For instance, your character is a certain shape with a certain type of basic skin and some basic clothing options. Anything you might imagine beyond this is probably not going to be allowed. Some of the editing options for other people's creations can also be a little unwieldy and you can end up changing a whole piece to a different color when only one piece of that shape was actually showing on the model. It isn't the developers fault that it's like this; but a little more identification of pieces on the model itself would help to prevent this from occurring. The Forza 3 editor has the designs on a grid off the car during customization because of issues like this. But it is by no means a deal breaker.
The game itself is a lot of fun, but the customization of tracks and karts seem to be the biggest focus for this title and after around 4-6 hours this was getting a little old. While I certainly love the concept, the depth of Modnation Racers doesn't seem to be anywhere near that of LittleBigPlanet and this could be a serious drawback for the game. The game is great, but I'm not entirely sure that Modnation Racers current level of depth is enough. While being able to rank up in ranked matches is the traditional why of doing it; I'm not sure that this system is appropriate for what Modnaiton Racers seems to be trying achieve. I don't think that hoarding experience points is the best way to play this game. I think the idea of the game is to be creative and make cool stuff. To do this the player will have to feel like there is some reason to do so; currently there isn't much reason to do so. Currently Modnation Racers has more in common with a traditional kart racer than it does with LittleBigPlanet. Perhaps that is the problem right there.
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