YMMV / ModNation Racers

• Awesome Music: The soundtrack is purely composed of hip hop, rap and dance-punk music. They are all fantastic tunes, and the soundtrack is also available for purchase in the PlayStation Store!
• Cult Classic: While the game's fairly obscure compared to the likes of Mario Kart, it has a fanbase for its versatile customization options.
• Difficulty Spike: Flaming Jumps. Not only is the track itself much less forgiving than previous ones, with fewer drifting opportunities and plenty of ways to fall off the track completely, it's also the first track in career mode where you must finish in first place to advance instead of just the top three. The elite driver, Hale, only makes matters worse. If he ever gets any kind of lead over you, expect it to grow exponentially if you can't keep up or use shortcuts.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Despite being just one of the many elite mods seen throughout the game, Shadow is a fan-favourite due to being a Creepy Cute goth girl with unexplained teleportation powers. The wiki even goes as far as to list her just below Tag and Espresso on the main page!
• Friendly Fandoms: With Blur and Split/Second (2010) due to having similar premises and being released at the same month.
• Porting Disaster: Due to technical limitations, the PSP version lacks a lot of the PS3 version's customization. For example, stickers on karts and mods are not in the PSP version, and the ability to create alternative paths, bridges, or even shift the track path is also not present. In addition, the tracks in the game are not made in the Track Studio as they were in the PS3 and PS Vita games, are not consistent with the PS3 tracks or even amongst themselves (the game's tracks seem to have a war between calling the race tournament ModRacing and MRC (ModNation Racing Championship), which the PS3 tracks settled on MRC), and one of the tracks, Modobahn, is outright missing from the PSP version.
• Sequelitis: The PS Vita sequel Road Trip lacks online play, completely removing one of the most vaunted aspects of the original game. This is on top of loading times and frame rate issues that result in the game running at half speed or worse in the later campaign races... in a racing game. Also, an error results in the Progressive Pack overpass prop (censored into the "Advanced Pack" with all Progressive mentions removed and the prop visual theme turning green) being rotated 90 degrees from where it should be on downloaded PS3 tracks, which messes up PS3 tracks that used the prop as a fence or a decoration.
• Squick: One of the engines is a human heart...that's still beating. There's no blood or anything but still...
• That One Sidequest:
  • What will always stick as an example of Fake Difficulty is the objective where you have to Sideswipe Three opponents in Fracture at the cliffside. Fortunately, an update toned down the difficulty of the objective: you now have to sideswipe just one opponent.
  • Modobahn's bonus objective used to be rather infuriating, requiring the player to take down an opponent using the devastators. Due to how finicky the hitboxes are for the things, combined with the small hitboxes of the karts themselves, as well as still needing to finish in first, it's no wonder the objective was simply changed in an update to simply require the player to destroy five karts in any way they feel like doing.
  • Craggy Hills has a bonus objective to avoid wall hits for an entire race, while still finishing first. While neither of these are too bad on their own, the switchbacks can be tricky at full speed, the AI is reasonably competent, and one mess up means starting over.

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