Review : Mantis Burn Racing

Title:Â Mantis Burn Racing
Platform:Â PS4 (Reviewed) / Xbox One / PC
Developer:Â Voo Foo Studios
Publisher:Â Voo Foo Studios
Release date: Out Now
tl;dr:Â Micro Machines with less crazy, more dirt and a helluva lotta drift
Price: Â£11.99 / $14.99 / â‚¬14.99
Family Focus: Click here for more information.

Voo Foo’s Mantis Burn Racing is another look at the top-down style of racing games, with a slightly different twist. From what I can tell, the game appears to focus on life-size cars with life-size speeds. This contrasts to the toy cars of Micro Machines and the RC cars of MotorStorm RC, yet it seems like it really wishes to be part of the small-car crowd.

Mantis Burn Racing challenges you in races, time trials, sprints and so on in an aim to progress through a career that skirts around all the tracks in both forward and backward directions.

In both the desert and metropolitan areas, the cars have two primary driving skills that you’ll use. You have the boost which offers a short burst of speed once the XP bar has been filled and you have an overzealous ability to drift across both tarmac and sand. The drift is strangely unbiased. I’d have expected the cars to hug the road a lot more tightly on tarmac, yet I was sliding around just as much as I was on sand.

The career mode offers to mix the races up by changing up the modes, although I did feel ever so slightly fatigued a few races in. I owe that not to the modes themselves, but due to the tracks feeling a bit too ‘same-y’. I wonder if that’s partly down to choosing to go down the route of top-down racing.

I’ll use Micro Machines as an analogy here; sure, there were several tracks that were garden-themed, but it’d be a wide variety of garden tracks from helicopters above grass to 4x4s around the patch. It kept it fresh and that freshness was something I didn’t really see in Mantis Burn Racing. All I saw was either tarmac or sand.

One thing I will tip my hat to the game for is offering a proper local multiplayer mode. The game can support up to four players locally. In today’s world where your only multiplayer comes in the form of online play, this is an extremely welcome addition. One day I helped a colleague pick out games for his daughters. It was surprisingly difficult to find games that go beyond the single-player mode locally on a console!

Playing on my own-some, I can’t say I had a blast playing Mantis Burn Racing. However, I can see this being half-decent when having some friends round for a throwdown. Probably a good fit for when a game like Toybox Turbos (the Micro Machines successor) would be a bit too ‘cartoony’ for the crowd you’re entertaining.