Developer: Nadeo
Publisher: Ubisoft
Platforms: PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4
Tested on: PC
Trackmania Turbo – Review
Trackmania is one of the franchises that has been known and loved from the start. It’s a go-to game for a fun arcade racing experience and is still enjoyed to this day in competitions. With the latest Trackmania, Trackmania Turbo, Nadeo hopes to build upon this successful franchise and have another great game to accompany the rest.
Story
Pretty much anyone has heard about Trackmania and knows there’s no story to be found at all. You simply jump into the game and start clearing tracks as fast as you can. This is what Trackmania is built around and since the release of the first game 13 years ago, there’s never been a story to go through. There isn’t really any disappointment for there being no story, because everyone knows this is how Trackmania rolls and knows there isn’t going to be any change in the story part any time soon.
Graphics
Graphics wise, Trackmania always has been pretty good and Trackmania Turbo is no exception. The graphics aren’t super realistic but they’re rather arcade-y and they look very good. All of the vehicles look greatly detailed and are pretty as well, even having a little bit of customization for the paint job, decals and more. Most of the scenery is also fairly well detailed but this doesn’t really matter because you’ll be speeding past most of it not allowing a good look.
The only very strange thing in the game are the options. You’d expect all of the options to be under the “Options” tab in the main menu, but this menu is actually very limited. To get to the real options you actually have to move your mouse to the top right of the screen and click the cog. Most people will recognize this from other Trackmania games, but it’s a very weird choice to put it hidden in the top right as well as having a more limited options menu.
Sound
When it comes to sound, it’s no expectation that Trackmania scores fairly good here as well. There’s a big assortment of music where you can include or exclude certain songs if you dislike them, usually from the Electronic genre which fits perfectly with Trackmania. Sound effects are also pretty good, with very satisfying engine/drifting sounds as usual.
Gameplay
Trackmania Turbo is a good old arcade racing game just like all of its predecessors. It features a ton of tracks ranging from easy to enormously difficult as well as local and online multiplayer. The goal of the game is to simply go as fast as possible, getting a gold/trackmaster medal on single player tracks and getting on the top of the board on multiplayer tracks, which is harder than it sounds.
This Trackmania game features four kinds of tracks: Canyon Grand Drift, Down & Dirty Valley, Rollercoaster Lagoon and International Stadium. Each of these tracks have a different focus than the other one and you’ll use different vehicles to complete them. In the Canyon Grand Drift, it’s all about tight corners with a car that’s easy to maneuver and to drift with. Down & Dirty Valley focuses more on dirt racing, giving you a nice buggy which handles best on dirt. Then there’s the Rollercoaster Lagoon which is all about crazy tracks with loops and barrel rolls, having magnetized sections of track so you can defy gravity with your cool car. Lastly there’s International Stadium where you’ll be driving a Formula 1 car, driving as fast as possible and keeping your foot on the gas and off of the break.
In total, the campaign mode features 200 tracks divided under five series: white, green, blue, red and black. The further you get in the series, the harder the tracks will get. Every series has 40 tracks, 10 in each kind of tracks discussed above. As everybody is used to, you can get a bronze, silver, golden and trackmaster medal on each of these tracks, increasing your worldwide ranking the better you do. If this isn’t hard enough for you, the campaign mode has a fun little “two driver” mode which makes two players drive the same car and the car accepting input from both players.
If you’re not one to play single player, Trackmania Turbo has you covered with an excellent online multiplayer as well as local multiplayer. This allows you to compete with other players in a fight for the first place on the leaderboard. However, it has to be noted that the multiplayer doesn’t have dedicated servers anymore as it used to, which is a huge disappointment for a lot of players. It does have it good parts as well however, because in most hosted servers, your screen is filled with text and rankings on the other Trackmania games.
Speaking about removed features, Trackmania Turbo has some other ones, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing actually. You can’t have custom car models anymore, custom paint jobs, custom player icons, custom horns and more. A lot of elitists have doomed Trackmania Turbo because of this, but it was kind of time that Trackmania was cleaned up and polished into a uniform game, which is exactly what happened in Trackmania Turbo.
Conclusion
Trackmania Turbo has received a lot of flame for deleting a lot of features (which actually weren’t important anyway, maybe except dedicated servers), but it’s still a very fun game to play nonetheless. It’s one of those games that you can go to if you have nothing to do, finish a few tracks and then get back to whatever you were doing. It features a big amount of tracks, a lot of challenge and an easy to use online multiplayer.
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