Someone at Sony clearly loves Mario Kart. Their first attempt at a cutesy kart racer was in the form of ModNation Racers for the PS3 and SPS. Now Sony have just announced that a LittleBigPlanet kart racing game will be with us before the year is out.

In the mean time, to bolster up the PS Vita's impressive batch of launch titles, the ModNations racing crew take a road trip via the Vita.

The key to what makes this racing game stand out on the grid from its fellow racers is in the title – 'mod'. Pretty much everything is up for modding; from your character, to your kart and to the tracks you race around. There's a lot of freedom here to go mad creatively and produce some really funky characters, karts and environs.

But if that doesn't sound your thing, that's ok too, as there's a world tour that is sure to keep you busy.

Modding aside, how does the game compete with something like Mario Kart in terms of the overall driving experience? In terms of the fun factor, it's right up there. It has a nice balance of weapons to pick up and shields to use. The karts handle really nicely on the many varied tracks too. But maybe it tries a little too hard to impress.

This shortcut sure beats getting stuck in a snarl up on the M1.

There's something simplistic about Mario Kart’s game play; very few titles have that pick up and play ability that all ages can appreciate, but also at the same time, offer a racing game with a deceptive amount of depth.

Road Trip does its darnedest to replicate this scenario, but doesn't quite pull it off. One of the issues is with the use of the Vita's face buttons. With the right shoulder button used for acceleration (the left is probably used for the brake, but does anyone actually use a brake in this type of game? If you do you should be ashamed of yourself), all the face buttons are assigned various tasks, like drifting, activating weapons, activating shields and boosting.

Now your thumb has to be pretty nimble to move around these buttons; so much so that it'll soon look like Michael 'Lord of the Dance' Flaherty of the thumb world as it skips back and forth from one button to the next. It doesn't help that they're also smaller than the average garden pea.

There's also a pretty steep learning curve. As you would expect, the first tour holds your hand gently through what to expect on the roads ahead. From the second tour onwards however, your hand is violently thrown back at you, your belt unbuckled and you're kicked out of the car as it speeds off into the distance without you. Yes that steep.

And like so many of these kart games before it, with so many weapons going off at any one time, it doesn't matter how good a driver you are, you can be sure that something bad is going to happen to you over the course of a race. So if you want to be number one on that podium, boy will you have to persevere.

Although customising your own character and kart is always a welcome touch, the idea of creating your own tracks is pretty damn awesome. If you put some time and effort into it you can come up with some really impressive circuits, which you can upload to the ModNation community. What's even better though, particularly if you have the patience of an evil four year old, is that you can download everyone else's efforts to drive on at your leisure.

But here comes the biggest but of all. Despite Sony bigging up the connectivity of their latest handheld system, to the point where they even release a 3G model for those with more money than sense, this game features no online multiplayer feature. And for a racing game of this ilk, that's just plain unforgivable. You can bet that LittleBigPlanet Karting won't make that kind of mistake.

Considering the poor effort of other driving games for the PS Vita, Road Trip puts all of them to shame. But that's not really saying much.

As a single player experience, the game has a lot to offer; particularly when you take into account the opportunity to download user-generated tracks to extend the life-span of the game to infinity. But leaving out online multiplayer was a heinous mistake.

As a stop-gap until the LittleBigSackPeeps get behind their cardboard wheels, ModNation Racers Road Trip is an entertaining and enjoyable ride – as long you don't expect to race against anybody else in the world.