2258: TrackMania Turbo: Impressions from the Full Version

I knew after just a couple of minutes of playing TrackMania Turbo’s demo that I needed the full game in my life, so it wasn’t long before I was in my local game emporium picking up a physical copy. (Discs rule. Yes they do.) And I’ve been spending some time with the full version. Here are some things you might like to know about it.

It’s an arcade racer with gloriously old-school handling

That means tapping the brakes to suddenly find yourself going sideways, powersliding around corners, releasing the accelerator to slow down only when you absolutely have to, and all that good stuff. It’s not realistic in the slightest, but TrackMania has always been about having fun that just happens to be in cars; it’s never been trying to be realistic, and it’s always been all the better for it.

There are four distinct environments, each with a very different feel

Earlier TrackMania titles incorporated multiple environments, each of which had its own unique vehicle with its own unique handling. TrackMania 2 bucked this trend by releasing each environment as a separate game — Canyon, Valley and Stadium. It was a controversial move that some saw as new publisher Ubisoft trying to make a bit more money off the game and perhaps it was — but each of these environments was very well fleshed out with plenty of variety. Plus each individual game was a fraction of the price of a brand-new triple-A game.

TrackMania Turbo incorporates revamped versions of the Canyon, Valley and Stadium environments from TrackMania 2 and adds its own Lagoon environment to the mix. Lagoon is somewhat similar to the Island environment from TrackMania United, but with a few additions — most notably magnetic rollercoaster tracks that your car sticks to, allowing for corkscrewing, loop-the-looping and all manner of other acrobatics with zero risk of your car flying off into the sunset or plummeting from a great height into shark-infested waters.

Pleasingly, each environment feels very different. The Canyon cars are extremely drifty — we’re talking Ridge Racer territory here. The Valley cars, meanwhile, are a little more twitchy, plus the wider variety of road (and off-road) surfaces means that you have to adapt to several different ways of throwing your car around. The Lagoon cars are the most sensitive and grippy of all, able to get around very tight corners without having to drift (or even slow down, in some cases), and the Stadium cars are much like their counterparts from the previous games: heavy but grippy, with the ability to throw them into a drift with judicious application of the brakes.

There’s a 200-level campaign

Yep, 200 races for you to complete. You can’t just challenge them in any order, though; you have to start with the “White”-level Canyon tracks, then attain enough medals to unlock the “White” Valley tracks, then the “White” Lagoon tracks and finally the “White” Stadium tracks — only then will you be able to move up to the next tier. The top two tiers of difficulty require silver and gold medals respectively, while the first three only require bronze medals.

This structure is a bit more restrictive than past TrackMania games in that you can’t jump back and forth between each environment’s mini-campaign if you get fed up with a particular track, but ultimately it gives the game a good sense of progression.

There’s a bunch of ways to play multiplayer

TrackMania has always been an incredibly overlooked local multiplayer party game, and hopefully its jump to consoles will help fix that. Turbo incorporates a number of different ways to play together.

Split-Screen is self-explanatory: everyone races together, first over the line wins, and the overall winner is determined by a best of three. This is noteworthy for being one of the only four-player split-screen games I’ve seen on the last two generations of consoles.

Arcade mode is a flexible mode where you can pick a track and then attempt to set a time using three “credits”. The top ten times are recorded on a high score table, so you can challenge your friends to beat your best times that you’ve previously set — or have a mini-tournament there and then.

Hotseat mode is most similar to the previous games’ multiplayer option. Up to 16 players can play in turn, each of whom is given a full tank of gas. Each player then attempts to set a time on the course; if the current leader is beaten, they then have to try and beat their challenger. The process repeats until everyone has run out of gas, and whoever is top of the leaderboard at that point is the winner.

All these local multiplayer modes can be played using any of the 200 campaign tracks (all of which are unlocked from the outset — no need to play single-player to open them up for multiplayer), any tracks you’ve built using the game’s track editor, or a randomly generated track that the game builds for you. This latter option is fun, but a little time-consuming: you can watch the game building the track piece-by-piece, then it has to spend a few moments calculating shadows for the objects it’s added. (Pro-Tip: choose “Fast” rather than “Nice” for lighting quality unless you want to wait a good 3 or 4 minutes before you can play the track.)

It’s built for console

TrackMania has always felt like a PC game. And I don’t necessarily mean that as a positive thing. Past installments have been highly customisable and expandable, but this came at a price: a clunky, inconsistent interface and an online component that required you know about (and are able to set up) dedicated servers and suchlike. The game was considerably expanded by a worldwide community of modders, in other words.

TrackMania Turbo doesn’t support mods, nor does it do dedicated servers — at least not in the same way as the earlier PC games. This, naturally, has made the PC crowd get furious as they are wont to do, but really for the average player it’s a change for the better. Multiplayer is now a case of just creating a room or joining an existing one. The interface is consistent and controller-friendly. You don’t need to worry about having the right mods installed just to make other people’s cars show up, or spend time tweaking settings to optimise performance. It is an overused phrase, but TrackMania Turbo just works, and thank God for that.

It’s the best arcade racer for years

While many of the more “arcadey” racing games have gone in the open-world direction over the last few years, making for sprawling, unfocused experiences where you dribble from one type of activity to another, TrackMania remains so true to its arcade inspirations that on its title screen it prompts you to “insert coin or press X”, followed by the sound of a coin clunking into an arcade machine when the main menu appears.

It’s presented well, with a clear, uncluttered interface, wonderful handling and a pick-up-and-play nature that is accessible (but challenging) to all ages, and with the combination of the track editor, the ability to download other players’ tracks and the random track generator, has potentially limitless replayability.

So if you like arcade racing — or the technical, puzzle-like stunt racing of titles like Ubisoft stablemate Trials — then you absolutely, definitely should pick up a copy of TrackMania Turbo as soon as possible.