TrackMania Review

By Tom Bramwell Published 19 November, 2003

It's not going to set the world on fire, but it deserves to burn some of Europe at least.

Version tested: PC

Ramps. Everyone loves ramps. When you had a bike or a skateboard as a kid, most of the fun was going up and down ramps. When you got bored in GTA, ramps were there for you, fuelling endless hours of cunning stunts. The key to TrackMania's brilliance is clearly ramps - they make the difference between a bunch of matchbox cars zooming around in an entertaining physics demo and the most addictive precision-racer in ages. And racing isn't even the point! Although TrackMania is devilishly addictive to race around, and completing the developer's opening salvo of 24 sometimes fiendish tracks to gold medal standard will happily swallow an evening and leave you gasping for more, the gimmick that makes the headlines is the construction element, which gives you a point A and a point B, a few pieces of track and a target time.

Rewarding

'TrackMania' Screenshot 1

Building tracks from the ground up is tremendous fun. It's like the roller coaster building aspect of RollerCoaster Tycoon given centre-stage. You don't have to worry whether the hot dog stand is making any money, because there is no hot dog stand - instead, you just get to revel in the enormity and lunacy of your looping death-trap and then either scoot around it yourself or upload it (at a few Kb in size) to another TrackManiac. But to really take advantage of the "sand box" track creation mode, which gives you a blank slate to play with in one of the game's three terrain types (snow, desert and rally), you will need to earn Coppers, the game's currency, and buy up some of the more exotic track pieces from the in-game shop.

Perhaps it's a bit cynical to lock away most of the track editor's potential from the start, especially given the "Design it! Build it! Race it!" strap line, but actually the single-player mode serves as a healthy tutorial and a juicy carrot to lure you in. In truth you won't really care that you couldn't get at the best bits, because, if you're anything like me, by the time you get to the track editor you'll know more than enough about the game engine and vehicle behaviour to craft some brilliant courses. And certainly more than you would have diving in right from the start.

Not being able to unlock the more imaginative track parts also means that your path through the single-player "Race" mode will introduce you to them all in turn. Each new challenge is initially loaded into the editor view, whether editable or not, and I regularly spent a few seconds before I attempted each task for the first time just mapping the route in my head and gawping at the prospect of, for example, having to get up enough speed and find the right angle to leap diagonally through a loop-the-loop and land on a piece of elevated track on the other side. Experiencing it for the first time is the best, so I'm firmly in favour of the "withhold the goodies" policy as applied here.

American Beauty

'TrackMania' Screenshot 2

Part of that is of course down to the quality of the driving engine, which is deceptively simple and extremely absorbing. Controls are old-school cursor keys, with no manual gearshifts, handbrake turns or anything like that, and the feel of driving each of the game's three cars (one for each terrain type) is distinct enough to give it the feel of three separate racers. Each set of tracks commands a different kind of racing skill, even though the same physics underpin every task in the game, with a particular weight to each car and similar behaviour when landing awkwardly.

Our favourite mode of transportation after many, many hours of plugging away is probably the middle car - the "American Car", according to the manual - which is a fairly fast saloon with bouncy suspension that does better going round the game's tight bends on two wheels than it does sliding them. The tracks for this car, which calls the desert its home, vary from simple arrangements of basic jumps (usually preceded by speed boost pads) to more elaborate multi-tiered offerings (and even a few multi-storey car parks), and they are definitely the most enjoyable to race and complete - and the repetition and desire to earn golds on these courses probably earns the distinction of being "one more go" territory with greater ease than the rest of the package.

The other two vehicles do well enough at their own thing, but neither demands the same sloppy sort of Hollywood driving precision, flying off ramps at an angle to try and land facing in the right direction or gliding past cacti in the sand - it's the right balance. The Japanese pickup truck on the snow tracks, meanwhile, is almost too precise - you're told in the manual that as long as you don't hit anything you won't lose any speed, and this car has the best suspension and balance of any car we've ever seen, rounding extraordinarily tight bends at breakneck pace without spilling a wheel. Then there's the European Turbo2 rally car, which looks like a bit like a ladybird on wheels, slides viciously enough on the mud and supposedly tarmac surfaces, and has zero traction on the grass - harder, although arguably more satisfying than the Japanese pickup.

Exploitative, bless

'TrackMania' Screenshot 3

Then again, the developer has done a very good job of playing to each car's strengths, and it's clear that every task in the game was a labour of love for somebody. The pickup tracks, for example, do their best to exploit the absurd friction, allowing the player to drive around solid wooden courses literally sideways on tipping hairpins, while the rally courses have track pieces with arrangements of shimmy-able logs and rocks to spice up straights, not to mention the game's only water hazards - although the effect of these shiny and reflective ponds and lakes is diluted somewhat when you fall into one and discover you just fall through it and disappear as though it wasn't there. (Hey, what is it with awful water hazards in racing games? In WorldRacing you could drive out on the ocean and through bobbing yachts, and in Midtown and GTA water means instant death! Gamers Against Rubbish Water Hazards Unite!)

Another way to get to know the intricacies of the game is to experiment with the "Puzzle" track offerings, which offer the added bonus of gradually introducing you to the track editor. The idea of each "puzzle" is to design the most efficient course to try and earn the gold model - the catch is that tracks vary from seemingly complete and semi-complete to just start, checkpoints and finish. Sometimes the task won't give you the amount of pieces you think you need, sometimes you'll have to exploit the physics by taking advantage of cheeky shortcuts to get your time down, and sometimes you'll have to look at a track and try and work out how you can alter its existing layout with a couple of choice pieces - for example, being given a couple of small ramps (enough to jump about one square of track) and an inefficiently designed course which laps round a big outcropping of rocks and checkpoints and seems to backtrack on itself a couple of times.

Although these certainly require more thought than the basic racing tasks (which, I can confirm, are playable in several states of consciousness), it's a much more rewarding feeling to complete a tricky course to gold medal standard because you outwitted French developer Nadeo. As you trundle and fall from an elevated track to a section below, cutting out a hairpin and a couple of ramps, and scoot through the finish line well within the time limit, you'll find yourself thinking "I bet they never thought of that". And there's nothing better than feeling smarter than the French, right? Eh? Am I right guys?

Driving with friends

'TrackMania' Screenshot 4

What should be one of the most glorious things about TrackMania is actually showing the French what you're made of via the game's online service. It's difficult to say whether the multiplayer element will do well online at the time of writing, because there aren't too many people playing it in this area with the game due out on November 28th. From my experience so far, the volume of cars and complicated behaviours of each means that some multiplayer games look a bit iffy, with opponents' cars clipping into scenery as the game seems to approximate their position a little, which flies in the face of the rest of the game - there are no clipping issues playing this alone, and the collision detection is exceptional.

That said though, the online service is otherwise extremely respectable. It doesn't demand your email address and sign you up to a stupid newsletter (yes, thank you Electronic bloody Arts) - it just works. You give it a username, password and a few details about your location (used to help filter servers more than anything, privacy fiends), and then you just click on the screen a few times to pick through servers. Game options are detailed for each, players can be added to a buddy list, and it's all so joyfully responsive - unlike the server navigation tools in most PC and indeed console titles.

And a bit of play over a LAN quickly demonstrates just why multiplayer is worth engaging in. You can race, alone or as a team, and time trial against one another, and there is definite scope to enjoy doing this for yonks, shading lap times with your flatmates or online buddy list competitors for hours. For me, TrackMania is quickly becoming the ultimate game to unwind with, as questing after the best lap times doesn't ask for too much brainpower and you can toggle the audio from the game's launcher and just sling on some music on the desktop. The prospect of competing with a well-organised community of like-minded racers fills me with excitement - as does the prospect of designing tracks for them and trying to master their tracks.

Shareware

'TrackMania' Screenshot 5

Which brings us full circle to the track editor, which is unquestionably a very versatile tool. It's kind of like the Build engine editor would have been back in the day if they had ever given it a decent front end. What you get is a grid, a number of pieces to choose from, the option to raise, lower and rotate them, options to do the same for the camera, and that's about it. With the handy keyboard shortcuts on the back page of the manual, you can actually learn to build tracks just using your keyboard, and it's perfectly possible to emulate the awe-inspiring and precisely crafted tracks from Nadeo's own designers after little more than an hour's work. The fact that each track is only a few Kilobytes in size (one I made earlier is about nine of the not even modem-chafing kilo-blighters) means we can probably look forward to community-made packs and, according to the developer, we can expect more from them to boot. Yep, TrackMania truly is the perfect PC game for Internet connected gamers. It's the perfect shareware title.

Oops. Hang on. But... no, you're right, this isn't a shareware game. It has a very generous shareware-like demo, which consists of ten puzzle and ten racing tracks and takes hours to truly get the most from and it's got the sort of graphical engine we usually associate with lower-end titles (some nice, tech demo-style vistas, lush and faintly cartoony texturing, massive draw distances and a rather generic overall design), but it comes in a DVD case and costs £29.99. Compounding the issue of whether it's "worth it", it's worth noting that the full game has about two and a half times the content of the free demo, although when it comes to user creations the sky's the limit.

When I took a look at the preview version of the game a few weeks ago (an early version of what then became the demo), I commented that it was comparable in terms of design and appeal to shareware classic Elasto Mania/Action Super Cross - evoking a sort of "fifteen-quid-for-the-rest-of-the-tracks" feeling, and I stand by that having taken on the finished game - but nevertheless the game does offer a lot of highly engaging content off the shelf, it gives you the chance to design even more elaborate tracks and has been built from the ground up to facilitate easy trading of ideas with fellow gamers. It may feel like a cheaper kind of game, but you'll still spend a huge amount of time getting the most out of it, and it's far more entertaining and polished than most of the third-person action rubbish we end up reviewing around here - oh how nice it is not to be complaining about a camera at this point in a review.

Worth keeping Track

In fact, the problem is that TrackMania exposes the simple fact that modern racing games are often pretentious, overblown affairs, and they simply can't match this for sheer fun. It almost feels awkward to play something this understated, but once you get over that you realise that all you need to have fun is a few squares of track snapped together creatively - and that you don't need in-game radio stations, real-time reflections or modern cityscapes to make your case. Nadeo just lets the gameplay do the talking, and it certainly talks to me. In the end, it's a package worth buying on its own - as long as you can stand the lack of licensing, narrative, voice acting or motion-capture, and I feel sure you can - and if you're reading this in 12 months' time and www.trackmaniagame.com is still alive and buzzing, then you can add one to the number below.

8 / 10

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About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (28) Latest comment 8 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • BradlayLaw #1 8 years ago

    I so very want to buy this, but note sure if I want to at £30. May go halfies with my flatmate who also played the demo compulsivly.

  • Errol #2 8 years ago

    This has been priced all wrong. Should have been £20 or below.

  • Blerk #3 8 years ago

    I was doing SO well on the 'system requirements' until I got to the '32mb 3D graphics card' bit. Buggeration.

  • jaa #4 8 years ago

    Isn't Mugwum in a good mood these past weeks? He likes most of what he plays...

    I bet he would have given Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon at least an 8...

    (j/k) :) :) :)

  • Shinji #5 8 years ago

    Isn't Mugwum in a good mood these past weeks?

    Ah! Haha! Hahahahahahahaha. God.

    ;)

  • TipTop #6 8 years ago

    Hmmm, I suspect PT of ulterior motives :)

    However I'm sorely tempted by this. I love the small developed ideas such as Up ... (Damn can't remember the game - was about hacking!) and the race one you downloaded for the t'internet (again memory fails me). I'll wait though for the game discount price of £20.

  • Mugwum Verified Operations Director, Eurogamer Network #7 8 years ago

    "I'm going to have to think about getting this, what a nice surprise!"

    Well what you want to do is get the demo first. There is enough there to occupy you for several hours at least and it should help make the decision for you.

  • Tyronne #8 8 years ago

    is it me or in all the reviews..the comments that say that such and such a game is the best thing since sliced bread always seem to come from unregistered people..or am i just daft...
    Though this is pretty good....and not because some of the people at jesters are fellow b3tans....like me.

  • FWB #9 8 years ago

    Demo was great. For £20 I'd snatch it up, but I'mnot paying 30.

    Beware online though, there are some real tits. I don't know if you've played PvP, but the objective is to navigate the circuit (which usually has a large number of paths, not all of which reach the finish). There are some idiot who will basically cheat, reversing off the back of the start and then driving around the outside of the entire course to the finish. I just can't see the point to this.

  • bungalooBunny #10 8 years ago

    Of course the 'anonymous' comments are of innocent by-passers that are in no way related to the game developers. Right. ;)

    'Tis sounds good though, but would agree with most people that it looks quite pricey. Surely £20 would have been pretty reasonable?

    Does anyone that played this has played Ignition as well? I loved that game and it was wonderful fun to play on LAN with my work mates, even better than Midtown Madness 3 (fun-wise).

  • Kavvy #11 8 years ago

    "Controls are old-school cursor keys, with no manual gearshifts, handbrake turns or anything like that,"

    I'd just like to add that in the demo I was using the dual analogue controls on my Saitek P880 no problem (with full analogue steering and acceleration), and one of the button did in fact act as a handbrake.

  • Eraser #12 8 years ago

    Sounds like that old game "Stunts", which is a good thing.

  • reflux #13 8 years ago

    I WANT this. Looks like loads of fun. Too bad it won't have the same "max the speed and then fly forever"-bug as in that stunts game that um.. 4d did?

  • Shrui #14 8 years ago

    Great review. I've been playing the demo for this for the last month and I can't stop. Much helped by the fact it plays great on my laptop thanks to the low 3D graphics requirements and only needs basic keys to play.

    The issue of people "cheating" in online challenges has become the old "honour play" argument that plagued JK2. Because the challenges set in the single player game require you sometimes have to bend the "must stay on the road for speed" rule, some people are arguing that this applies to the online game giving them license to cheat.

    To a certain extent you could cheat proof your track with checkpoints (crossing the finish line won't work until all points are crossed) if Nadeo makes them available in the track editor.

  • FWB #15 8 years ago

    True or you could place the finish off the ground, but my point was more one of why on earth do it? It makes less sense than cheating in BF1942. Everyone sees you do it and there's just no game in it. You reverse off the course and drive the whole length to the finish, just so you can get 20s on a 3min lap?

    When is this out again?

    the collision detection is exceptional.

    Does that mean unlike the beta you can ram players off the road? Ideally they'd be an option to turn this on or off, but I would like to play dirty.

  • smirny #16 8 years ago

    When is this out again?

    28th Nov... a week on fri infact :)

  • Shrui #17 8 years ago

    "but my point was more one of why on earth do it? It makes less sense than cheating in BF1942."

    I suspect they have so little self esteem that getting their name on top of the score board even by cheating makes them feel good. And there are people, in my experience playing JK2 on Jolt, who just like spoiling other people's gaming experience.

    I'm guessing of course, I don't really get it either. Probably a good thing that we can't. :)

  • brokenkey #18 8 years ago

    >All the hidden Nadeo medals were achieved with the keyboard. If they can do it then so can we :)

    What are these hidden Nadeo medals of which you speak?

  • KingChaser777 #19 8 years ago

    I am in gaming heaven again. Trackmania is a breath of fresh air compared to much of the stench ridden games littering the shelves.

    I can understand people harshly judging it as shareware but after a few goes it becomes clear its value is warranted. A £20 price tag may have been better but the £30 price wont detract fans away from the games potential to deliver months of frenzied fun.

    Graphically it does the business. Everthing is clear precise and definitely not lacking polish. In a way the game is designed like a puzzle, so the visuals are fitting. An over the top detail level would probably distract from the experience rather than enhance.

    Overall I will be salivating with anticipation until the 28th.
    Edited by 1 at 20/11/03 @ 16:46

  • Smugglarn #20 8 years ago

    If this game is half as fun as 4D Sports Driving, from back in the day, it will be a blast! And multiplayer as well! So far it looks like a winner to me. :D
    It will also be interesting to see how Crashday compares to this game. Well, I'm off to try the demo...
    Edited by 1 at 11/12/03 @ 16:37

  • 205gti #21 8 years ago

    4d Sports Driving - brings back fond memories of driving an Integrale around my custom tracks and bouncing it miles into the air using half a dozen jumps in a row.

    Fantastic. All this on a 486!

  • Tiger_Walts #22 8 years ago

    I tried the demo thinking I'd spend an hour at most on it, it just goes to show that simple ideas can be the best, I didn't stop playing for 4 hours.

    The handling is set up perfectly for playing on the keyboard, taking those corners tight enough to get onto 2 wheels, the airborne wheels hovering over the inside kerb, but shallow enough not to slide is thoroughly possible.

    Great stuff!

  • pjmaybe #23 8 years ago

    Tis a fantastic game that :

    A) I cannot recommend highly enough and
    B) Will probably sell about 5 copies in this EA-obsessed land.

    Shame though, it's a true cult classic. Wait till the price drops a bit and snap the fucker up!

    Peej

  • Aka #24 8 years ago

    Also £25 at Play.com. Saw it in GameStation other day second hand (missed price). Sounds like a great game.

  • pjmaybe #25 8 years ago

    $100 you say? (strokes copy lovingly)

    Nahh couldn't do it.

    Peej

  • UncleLou #26 8 years ago

    This is so ridiculous. Can't they think of a more amusing excuse at least than the same old "I've lost the CD key"?

  • Tiger_Walts #27 8 years ago

    1G07-P1NK-4C1D-8007-50N!

  • Tiger_Walts #28 8 years ago

    I paid a tenner for mine. :D

    Didn't ask for a keycode on install but it will ask for online play.