TrackMania Nations Forever Review

At 1.30am last night, I couldn't tell you whether I loved or hated TrackMania. What I can tell you is that I was playing it. Or more specifically, playing one track. Again and again. Determined to beat it. Increasingly tired, and as such increasingly unable to make the perfectly timed turns to get that Gold medal that sat between me and sleep.

Right, so there's some confusion to deal with. What exactly is going on with Nations Forever? It's free. Utterly and entirely free. As was the previous TrackMania Nations - a stripped down version of the series created for use in the Electronic Sports World Cup. However, Forever is also a free add-on for the most recent retail release, TrackMania United. The result is, United is now called TrackMania United Forever, and when purchased new will come with 3D glasses to take advantage of the new 3D mode. Muddled yet? Well, wait.

United's big hook was the online play. You could play the game in the offline mode, and then at any time attempt an "official" run, which would upload the results to the international database, and rank you alongside anyone else who'd attempted that track. Well, now the same appears in Nations Forever, along with 65 completely new stadium tracks, for both solo and multiplayer racing. Previously Nations was completely separate from the rest of the TrackMania series, but now Nations Forever and United Forever are fully integrated. People with Nations can race on the Nations-specific tracks against people playing United.

Don’t be fooled by the "United" banners. This is Nations inside of United.

Just in case anyone's not clear, TrackMania is about flinging zippy cars around utterly impossible tracks, looping loops, bouncing on water, all combined with taking perfectly timed corners to shave a hundredth of a second off the previous best time. It's about undiluted fun, combined with precision driving (although without any stupid "realism" to ruin the fun). And since United, it's about being better at that track than anyone in the world, or at least, in my case, trying to be better than someone in the South West of England, which is as specific as it gets in its league tables. With United you get various modes of play familiar to all in the non-free series: racing, platform and puzzle, with a large variety of vehicles. Nations, however, is all about the racing, and about driving the Formula 1-style cars.

The car customisation allows an artist to express himself to his fullest maturity.

But what's most important about TrackMania - what makes it stand out from everything else - is the instant restart. Screw up, and you will about 39034 times a day, and you just stab "Enter" and it takes you back to the last checkpoint, or hit "Backspace" to get to the start of the race. It happens so quickly you'll wonder if it's psychic. This is exactly how games should treat you. A second's load time and it might get annoying. The split-second restart ensures you'll play until your fingers fall off.

So if you download Nations Forever, as is, what exactly are you getting? As I mentioned, it's 65 new tracks in five difficulty bands, unlocked by successfully completing earlier tracks in each category. And as is becoming fantastically familiar with Nadeo's series, they are superbly designed and novel courses, created with a precision that makes scoring a Bronze engagingly simple, and achieving the Gold maddeningly tricky. These medals are represented in-game by "ghost" cars, meaning you literally race against the goal times, which is a billion times more satisfying than keeping an eye on the clock. It also means you can study their technique and steal it for success.

It's designed for e-sports, but also for just having a stupidly excellent time mucking around with. And while it doesn't contain Puzzle or Platform, it does nod toward the latter with its "Obstacle" courses, which require some inventive leaping and bouncing. But more than anything, it's 65 tracks for free! Free! And you can play online against the world, both in the solo mode, or in the madcap, sometimes unintelligible multiplayer mode.

TrackMania cars can't touch each other. Everyone's a ghost to everyone else. So in multiplayer you're all on the same track at the same time, racing to see who can get the best times, but starting whenever you like. It's bedlam. It's also ranked on the international ladders.

Nations Forever also comes with its own track editor, so it doesn't end with the 65. Downloadable player-created content means the game will expand to infinity. You can customise your cars with the painting facilities. You can edit videos of your own driving. Then there's Party Play for LAN and a gang of people sat around one computer, and the Explorer, which works like a cross between a mini-internet and a social networking site, from which you can download tracks, replays, movies, etc, created by other players.

If you're picking up Forever to expand your copy of United, you won't only get the new "Nations" category in your sidebar with the new levels, but you'll also find there's extra materials appearing in the track editor, and a graphical overhaul of the original race categories, Desert, Snow and Rally, to bring them up to speed with the more recent courses.

Since TrackMania Sunrise, Nadeo have been the best at sunsets.

There's some (more) confusion over the pricing of picking up United Forever new. The US price on Steam went up from USD 30 to USD 40 when the free add-on was added (it's stayed at USD 40 for Europe). Which doesn't seem so free, but of course it's within Nadeo/Ascaron's remit to charge whatever they wish for their game. It does seem a bit much to increase the price of a year-old game, and the new retail version will of course cost more than finding a year-old copy of United and then adding the download. Um, we recommend you do that quickly before the shops switch them all over. You'll miss out on the 3D glasses, but, well, yes.

In the cold light of day I can tell you, emphatically, that I love TrackMania. In the cold light of day I was able to get the Gold and move on. If United got anything wrong, it's that it was too hard. As the lead dev, Florent Castelnerac, said in the comments of the United review, "I even [can't] get the gold medal on the last one: PlatformE, but I wanted to give lasting appeal to the expert out there." Forever's new tracks absolutely nail the difficulty. Oh, and by the way, the minimum specs are a 1.6GHz CPU, 256MB RAM and a 16MB video card.