Take Matchbox Cars, Cub Scout’s Pinewood Derby, add in flexible funky tracks, and marry it with the best ladder system around, then toss in your local corkscrew rollercoaster, and then… you have the latest installment of the Trackmania racing series.
Trackmania United looks great and plays well too. On an ATI X1900 Dual Core rig you can max everything out with no slowdown whatsoever. This is one of the few games out there where a mid-range system can crank up all the eye candy (including FSAA and AF) and not have the slightest hint of lag. Though the graphics are sharp there is a bit of repetition within each “field of play.”
Solo play offers three modes of play. First, there is timed racing in seven different environments. The environments range from your local soccer stadium to snowy environs. Rally roads of the English countryside, Baja-like deserts, and many more. In this mode you race to gain “coppers” which is the on-line form of currency. Some people do well financially with just the racing and make plenty of coppers to fill out an extra stable of cars and tracks. However if you stink at arcade racing don’t fret. You make coppers each day whether you race or not. Submitting your own tracks and cars is probably the best way to make coppers, as you’re duly rewarded for your effort. This is an excellent idea to keep the community submitting their work instead of just having it sit on their own computer hard drive. However, if you’re not very good at racing, and don’t want to bother making an on-line contribution, most stuff is pretty cheap, anyway. This is not like your free MMO that makes you grind for cash, but is just incentive enough to keep you moving forward. It’s simply a great implementation of on-line dynamics.
The second mode of solo play is “puzzle” mode. Here you only have a set amount of track sections to complete a race layout going from point A to point B. This mode would have been a lot more fun if there were pop-ups to tell you exactly what it is you’re looking at. Though the first sets of easy puzzle tracks are fun, later on the complication factor makes it a chore and the reward for completion doesn’t fit the time invested.
The third mode of solo play is platform mode. Here you don’t race, but try and complete each complicated track without having to restart. This is great for those that like to keep doing the same thing over and over till they get it perfect. But honestly, you feel the urge to get through it rather than actually enjoy the process. It feels more like busywork.
The on-line component is where Trackmania shines and the United name comes into its own. When you run the on-line component the amount of zones and ladders they’ve created is fantastic. Let’s take your previous game ladder, Battleblub. You look at the multiplayer options in Battleblub and as is normal they’re light. After playing for a few weeks you see you’ve risen to -two billionth place on the ladder.
Thankfully Trackmania United does things different; here’s why: You have the option to set the game to your real home state. It then tracks stats in that ladder. Another neat twist is it compares every state in the U.S. At the writing of this review Michigan (my state) was ranked 20th amongst all the 50 states. Don’t worry, the game isn’t being ethnocentric. They’ve set up this system for (as near as I can tell) every country in the world. Each country is then divided into regions, states, or city zones. Whatever is relevant to your area. It’s so elegant; it should just be copied by other developers who’d like to see a ladder system not split by random servers, or clumping everyone into one single list.
Finding people to play in a specific zone might not always happen, but there are always people in other zones to play with. Don’t like living in the United States? Switch to Tanzania. You’ll be near the top of the list in no time!
