Unless your very young, in which case - wait until you're older!
Some of you may have played the first Trackmania game so to
you I'll just say its more of the same but WAY better looking and polished.
Actually it probably doesn't matter what the hell I say. If you played the
first you've probably already bought this. So I'll just write this for the
newbies.
Trackmania 2 is a driving game in which you get two basic
modes, offline and online. So looking at both in order :
Offline is basically time trials. You get dozens of tracks
to choose from and opening each you are presented with three medals to race
for, gold down to bronze. Depending on which you choose a ghost car also
appears on the track and in order to win the medal you have to beat it across
the finishing line. Easy as that. If you fail to win and replay the track again
there is a second ghost car which is your best performance so far so you race
the computer and yourself.
This might sound slightly dull on paper but it really isn’t.
For one thing there are the tracks themselves which are insane. Totally
impossible physically with crazy jumps, twists and drops so it’s more like you
are racing over a huge tarmaced rollercoaster than a racetrack. Then there's
the rankings. I've never been much of a person for leader boards but after
putting in my details and playing a few tracks I'm told "Well done, you
are 250,496th in the world (or whatever) and 327th in Wales". That's what
gets you. The need to be 326th locally. Then 325th. That "I'll just have
one more quick try" factor to try and shave a quarter second off your best
time.
Then there's the immediacy and pure arcade style fun of
this. Going through the tracks four out of every five have something around
30-40 seconds as your target time. It’s this short burst element which gives it
an Angry Birds style addiction and you'll find your "Just one more go,
it'll only take half a minute" will suddenly turn into two or three hours.
To compliment this rapid play, at any time you hit the backspace button and the
track resets without even the slightest hint of a delay. While this is fun
though the real meat of the game is online.
Online runs through its own server which works really well
but to be honest I would have preferred it personally if, like the first game,
it ran through Steam. As you'd expect you log in, select one of the hundreds of
running games and are thrown in with 20 or so other players. Here though you
are given a set time per track, usually five minutes, and its down to you to
get the best completion time during that period. The fact the other cars are
intangible did seem a bit of a shame at first but due to the complexity of most
tracks it would be fairly impossible to put that many impactable cars on
without it being total chaos. In game banter is generally done in text, but I
did join a few servers which were giving channels of a game chat add on should
you prefer. The game allows you to upload an icon to represent yourself and
these are shown as little floating tags above the other cars for
indentification in-race which does make for some fun competition when
transferred to the leader boards between each track. Knowing you only need to
complete a lap a second faster to go from 20th to 10th is some serious
incentive.
The last factor of this game is the inbuilt level designer.
I'll admit I only dabbled with this slightly but it did seem very
straightforward and intuitive and having raced on some custom home made tracks
in the online mode I can attest that it’s possible to make some seriously
hardcore levels of your own. What I did spend some time with though, was the
car designer. You can only manually paint onto a dozen or so basic car shapes
but I did quite enjoy doing this. As a result if you do get this game and see a
jet black car with a black and red rear spoiler and the Batman symbol on the
doors and bonnet that’s me. And yes I know its childish and NO I don’t care
because it looks AWESOME in-game. Even if the "Oi Batman... last again,
eh?" chants got a bit old quickly
:(
So in summary this game rocks. I'm not usually a big driving
game fan (exluding the insanity of Split Second : Velocity) but I'm totally
hooked on this. The offline mode is a fun distraction for when you have 10
minutes to kill and the online is insane fun. Even when I was invariably coming
in at the tail end each time I was still eager to play the next track and try
and do a bit better and the online community seemed surprisingly idiot free and
were more about the fun of the game than abusively lording it over newbies. Add
to this the fact that the level designer means new tracks are constantly being
uploaded and you're getting a LOT of game for your £20.
Highly recommended.
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