If you’ve not heard of VooFoo Studios before, where have you been? Based in Birmingham, they’ve been producing games for a decade, including Pure Pool and Hustle Kings. Their latest game, Mantis Burn Racing (MBR), is their first in-house developed and published game building on their past successes.
It’s also the first native 4K title running at 60fps on the Playstation 4 Pro, not a bad accolade for their first published title.
On to the game itself, MBR is a blend of your classic top-down isometric racers (a la Micro Machines, Mashed, etc) but with a more finely tuned handling system. This is a game that rewards thinking about driving lines, braking, drifting and cornering and will punish those who expect an arcade driver and think they can just wail on the accelerator and hope stern manipulation of the joy-pad can get them through easily. Frankly, the best way to describe it is any mistakes will be your own damn fault and shouldn’t be taken out on the controller or your gaming machine of choice. It can be a frustrating experience to begin with but when you settle in to the groove and perfect your driving style, you get a genuine sense of satisfaction when you finally beat that race.
There’s also a solid, challenging career mode if you don’t fancy getting online straight away or want to practice prior to getting your friends around for some of that oh so rare experience nowadays.
Battle Cars is their third DLC pack, following on from the free Snowbound DLC, with snow themed tracks and more veteran challenges and the ‘Elite Class’ DLC pack, which added a brand-new class of ‘Elite’ Hover vehicles to the game.
The Battle Cars Pack adds three new vehicles to the mix, the Stinger, The Mauler and the Lancer. All equipped with machine guns and mines, but all with different play styles. From the nimble stinger to the hefty Mauler each car adds variety to play style with variations of grip, acceleration and speed to match to the track.
Talking of play styles there’s three all-new combat specific events, ‘King of the Track’, ‘Survival’ and ‘Accumulator Rumble’. There’s also an additional stand-alone ‘Battle’ career campaign featuring 26 events to sink those rounds of ammunition into. It’s a great way to add an extra flavour to the game with a way to challenge mates and strangers online and locally to ‘Mad Max’ style racing and helps balance those who aren’t the smoothest racers but can put up a good punch-up.
Mantis Burn Racing is available for Steam and PlayStation 4 for £12.99 and for XBoxOne for £11.99 at time of Review. The Battle Cars DLC pack is available to download for : £1.99 / €2.49 / $2.49.
Reviewed on “The Beast” (aka Ryan’s Laptop) Gigabyte P37w v3
- Core I7-4720HQ
- 16GB DDR3
- NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 970M GDDR5 6GB
- Played at 1080p (Full HD)
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
MINIMUM:
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- OS: Windows Vista
- Processor: 2.0 GHz Dual Core
- Memory: 3 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 500 series
- DirectX: Version 10
- Storage: 100 MB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0C compatible
RECOMMENDED:
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- OS: Windows 7+
- Processor: 2.0+ GHz Dual Core
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 700 series plus
- DirectX: Version 10
- Storage: 100 MB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0C compatible
VooFoo Studios:
Twitter @VooFoo
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