TrackMania Turbo
TrackMania Turbo is the newest installment in the TrackMania series. For those of you, who don’t know what TrackMania is, it’s an arcade racing game series, developed by Nadeo. There isn’t much to the games, you just drive fast on tracks, that would definitely be banned on their first day of existence in the real world. The games usually have multiple zones, each one looks and plays differently: the exceptions are TrackMania Nations, which was free, but only included the stadium; and TrackMania ², which sold each zone for 20 bucks, and that’s quite greedy. TrackMania games in general are hard do explain, just play the free one to see for yourself. TM Turbo didn’t have many gameplay differences, but this one was ‘special’: Ubisoft was involved.
What everyone expected was a buggy mess, running at a stable 10fps, crashing when you breathe inside the 10km radius of the game and probably including microtransactions (since another game Ubisoft picked up was Tetris Ultimate). What they didn’t expect was the fact that TM Turbo is going to be a great game that any racing game lover could enjoy, and that’s what it turned out to be. Now for some pros and cons, ‘cos that’s what I do.
The pros
- Despite Ubisoft being involved, TrackMania Turbo stays true to its roots.
- Some may hate the cars’ design changes, but I think they are reasonable: i.e. in the canyon/drifting region, a heavily modified rally car is much more fitting than a stereotypical redneck car.
- The game’s general feel has been changed to feel more modern, but in a good way, so don’t worry, no dank memes here.
- The level editor can randomly generate short tracks.
- A new ‘stunt’ mode, where you can control your car in mid-air and get turbo for doing stunts.
The cons
- The customisation was seriously dumbed down — you can only apply predetermined paintworks and a flag decal on your spoiler.
- To access online features, you have to… use… Uplay… oh God.
- Loading times where they shouldn’t be: i.e. there’s a loading time when going from the main menu to the car customisation screen, which loaded instantly in the previous games.
