Making your own tracks is a breeze. You simply drop stuff on the flat surface. Manipulating the 3D environment could be slightly more intuitive however. (I’ve become so accustomed to three-button mouse control of 3D environs so it feels slightly clunky in Trackmania United.) You can make all kinds of cars and the creativity of the on-line community is simply phenomenal. And really… that’s what this is game is all about. It’s about a developer making a game for the on-line community - and giving them the tools to prosper. This brings us to the next improvement in the on-line component – “Maniazones.”
“Maniazones” are all your extras tied up in one package. Instead of telling you to go hunt for mod-sites on your own, this is a functional in-game component of the game that seamlessly integrates user content, sites, news, the “Best Rated Content, etc” - all within the game. You could spend a year looking through all the content because it not only spans this game, but most of the content from the previous Trackmania games is importable as well. As Trackmania was released many months ago, it already had a vibrant on-line community which has benefited from all these integrated features.
In the end, the solo play features can get a bit boring. Sure you can do loops and all the things you “wish” you could do with a real-life car, but with a limited graphic set it does get old in time. The on-line flexibility, however, has made this a title that with fantastic staying power. In fact during my first few on-line matches I was perplexed why people wanted to race these funky tracks over and over again. There’s no killing, there‘s limited “rewards”, you can’t upgrade your engine, or change spoilers. There’s no damage modeling and the physics in the game are pretty bad (unless you like racing on Mars). The car handling is finicky and some car models are darn right frustrating to drive. But just knowing your next race could be against someone driving a paper towel tube from Slovakia gives it a fun factor you can’t get from any other racing game. The on-line features and modding are the true guts of the design. You can pick the game up for $30 on STEAM. With that you’ll have hundreds of hours of fun and you’ll inherit a community which is second-to-none.
