Sure, they probably won’t end up being permanently connotative to the genre the way shells and mushrooms are, but it’s undeniably fun to turn your kart into a gigantic boxing glove to ram people, or to hit a button that fast-forwards your progress on the track.īut LBP Karting knows it would never topple Mario by being a Mario Kart clone, so it focuses instead on the things that make the LBP franchise in general so great. While LBP Karting can’t really match those sorts of iconic power-ups, the power-ups here aren’t all that shabby. We’ve also seen classics come and go, such as Crash Team Racing back in the PSOne era.) Mario Kart has a huge advantage in terms of sheer iconic value the idea of firing red and green turtle shells, for example, is almost synonymous with the kart racing genre itself. Let’s just put this out on the table right away: LBP Karting is really Sony’s answer to Mario Kart. But is LittleBigPlanet Karting fine with that? Let’s take a look.

While gaming’s favorite Italian plumber introduced us to the concept back in the SNES era, the formula has barely changed since then, with the biggest evolution probably being the exchange of sprites for polygons with Mario Kart 64.

Little big planet karting