What strikes me about Mantis Burn Racing is its simplistic nature; the developers could have easily overcomplicated things with the likes of excessive upgrade options, but VooFoo Studios did an amazing job of making everything flow together as you can go from racing to levelling to upgrading your car with relative ease.

Speaking of cars, the game breaks cars into three weight and class categories. While I didn’t notice any difference in class categories, you can definitely see them in the weight categories. The three weight categories are light, medium and heavy, and each weight has their own advantage and disadvantage, for example, heavy cars have a high top speed but poor acceleration and light cars offer the best grip and suspension. Nevertheless, while cars are important, let’s talk about the racing and tracks.

When it comes to racing there are eight event types including time-trial, knockout ( the last car at the end of a lap is eliminated until one car remains), and a simple 2 lap sprint race. In terms of track choice, there are also eight tracks (sixteen if you include reversed versions) spread across two locations, which are desert landscape and a city. Honestly, the track variety is a bit of a letdown. Now let’s talk about the racing. Racing is a good mixture of challenging and fun as the game pushes you to drift around corners and be as reckless as possible because the more drifting and reckless driving you do the fasters your boost charges. While I really enjoyed the racing, I did find the cornering to be somewhat difficult. It might have being that I’m not used to playing top down racing games, but I found it difficult to judge when to turn in.

As I mentioned earlier the game has an upgrade system. The upgrade system worked by unlocking upgrade parts via career mode or by simply levelling up. When you gain an upgrade part you can simply attach it to a car that has an available upgrade slot. With the amount of upgrades available, you can create your own driving experience, and of course, if you get sick of your setup you can scrap your upgrades and start again.

Now, let’s talk about modes. First of all the game offers a 7-season long career mode that encompasses all the game’s modes and allows you to easily unlock upgrades. Apart from career mode, there is local and online racing. For those who enjoy split-screen multiplayer, there is up to four-player split screen action.

Finally, before reaching my conclusion, let’s talk about graphics and audio. Graphically the game offers some stunning visuals, but I couldn’t help, but notice that some objects including trees did have a tendency to obstruct my view. In terms of audio, the game felt flat with cars sounding muffled and the only real audio being that of the game’s music.

Conclusion

Mantis Burn Racing is a fun fast-paced racing game, while the game does have minor issues, Mantis Burn Racing is an overall solid racing experience.

Score: 8/10

For more information on Mantis Burn Racing, visit http://www.voofoostudios.com/game/mantis-burn-racing/.