Mantis Burn Racing is an arcade style racer that has you racing from a top down perspective against other computer controlled opponents and other racing styles of events. It has a both an online racing modes as well an offline career mode.
General Gameplay
Mantis Burn Racing is a racing game, well more of an arcade style of racing game with light RPG elements to it. You have different types of cars, both off road and street that you can use, upgrade and customize. The game has a career mode that you can go through that has different type of events from your general race, time trials, and knockout events. When you do different feats the game rewards you credits to use towards your car, also with level progression you can unlock more customizations to your car from shocks, tires, and other things that will help you balance out your car.
Audio
The game has its engine revving and some background music. There is no surround sound support but in this game it is not needed. Also for headset users in your gaming family the sound is acceptable. Parents there is no type of language or anything offensive that would need supervision for playing this game.
Visuals
As with any racer you have your graphics that show the car and the course. VooFoo Studios did a great job making the game feel like a racer. From the city skylines, to dirt tracks the game is able to showcase these objects without any problems. However in our playtest some of our gaming family found it hard to keep up with the action as the game was very dark in some parts and other parts the action was moving very fast that they have lost track. There is no colorblind mode, but your gaming family members can play the game without any issues.
Controls
The controls for Mantis Burn Racing are very easy to get a hold of. With a brake/reverse, gas and turbo the game is designed for people to pick up and play without any need of a tutorial. As being the nature of any racing game it is meant to be played on a steering wheel more so over a controller but this is not needed in this case. Using the controller works well in this game. In our playtest again we did notice that some of the controls was laggy at times. We thought at first that this was due to our controllers but with more playtest while playing couch co-op that this was the case. Again this was on only one race but still we did see some issues with the controller lag. Parents if you are allowing any gamer to play the game please be aware of this.
“The career mode is a good one, but it still has that been there done that feeling”
Delivery
In our playtest the one thing that kept coming up was “I have seen this before” when it came to the game. Now what this is referring to is the levels. This was one of the things that got very repetitive in the game. To the games credit it tried to mix things with the different events and even reversing the courses but the only thing that it did was just made the tracks more of a chore to race on. Also with the sporadic lighting, collision detection and the very bipolar AI it was very hard and then very easy to play the game. It seems during our playtest that the game itself was very aggressive and then when you went to redo the race the computer AI became very lax to the point that our gamers during the playtest were winning the races without any struggle. Also in our playtest some of the gamers that we tested the game with were just getting bored with the game tracks. We would have loved to see more tracks or even special events within the career mode but there were just not there.
Family Friendly
Mantis Burn Racing to its core is an arcade racer, being as such it is a limited racing game. When we had our playtest some of the gaming members of our family got real frustrated with the AI of the game. Also with limited courses they got bored of racing the same courses over and over again. Also with some lighting issues it made it hard to see when the cars would go into the cave and the city night level. We tested this on both a 1080P and 4K monitor and notice the same issue on both monitors visual setting. Also with our special needs gamers we did see that they lost interest in the game after a couple of races. With our gamers with Autism they did have some motion issues with the game rotating the camera throughout the course. We tried to look to see if there was a way to fix this in the options but there was not any option to correct this. With this being said, is Mantis Burn Racing a bad game? No but it is more of an acquired taste for pure racing fans.
Closing
With some questionable AI and limited racing courses, Mantis Burn Racing is for those true racing fans in your gaming family. As a casual racing game for your gaming family there are other more friendly titles out there for you to choose from.
