Ubisoft's gorgeous arcade racer should go down a treat with console owners.
Trackmania Turbo is the thrilling arcade racer this generation has been missing, but it's also a damn frustrating game at points.
To unlock all of Trackmania Turbo's campaign events, split between four zones and four different cars, you've got to be bloody good at driving virtual cars. Most of these events are point-to-point time trials, your vehicle hurtling around the track in order to make the exit in a time fast enough to earn a bronze, silver or gold medal (or a hidden one I'm not even going to pretend I'll ever get close to achieving). I've got a handful of gold medals, but most are silvers. Trackmania is a hard game.
Each car has a very distinct handling model, and I certainly enjoy some more than others. My favourite is the heavy, drift-friendly beast used to tackle the Canyon courses. Feeling very much like a classic '90s arcade racer, the powersliding is excellent and rekindles memories of Daytona (with a touch of Ridge Racer). I'm less keen on the twitch-happy buggies used for the Down and Dirty Valley courses, which always seem on the edge of careering out of control, but the cars used for the Lagoon Rollercoaster and International Stadium are more to my liking (read as: I can drive them better).
Split-screen multiplayer is a big part of Trackmania Turbo. To perform this amazing feat, players must mirror each other’s steering to get through the track. TrackMania Turbo received 'generally favorable' reviews, according to video game review aggregator Metacritic.
Track designs are deliberately tough, and perhaps a touch unfair. Obstacles stand in the middle of the course, jumps send you flying out of bounds if you dare enter them at a non-optimal angle, and clipping a rock can result in the kind of spinning an Olympic diver would struggle to control. Thankfully you can instantly restart an event, Trials style: something you'll be doing over and over again.
There's a lot of content locked away in the campaign, most of which requires a certain number of silver or gold medals in order to access. I'm not sure I'll ever be good enough to unlock it all, such is the difficulty Trackmania relishes in torturing you with, so I'm thankful you can see all the courses inside the (local) fastest-time 3-credits-a-go Arcade mode. Courses can be learnt, of course, and nothing ever appears randomly to throw you off, but this is most definitely a game for people who get a kick out of trial and error improvements.
Outside of the Campaign and Arcade action, a whole heap of multiplayer modes exist, throwing up to 100 players together on a track (as well as ghost cars shooting around all over the place) as you all try to get the fastest times. It's great fun, and there are loads of options to play with when setting up a lobby. I personally prefer to chip away at my fastest times without the spectacle of cars leaping about, but the online modes make for a nice break.
More engaging is the game's selection of standard and oddball local multiplayer modes. Four-player split-screen play is offered for the usual head-to-head stuff, but there's also a bizarre two-player co-op mode in which the duo control a single car, having to combine their efforts to steer the vehicle around the track. Another mode (hidden on the multiplayer menu) is single-screen multiplayer that harks back to Micro Machines. If someone falls off the viewable area, they're out. Fun stuff.
Building things in video games has never been a major plus point for me. The idea always sounds appealing, but the reality is usually something that takes away from the time I have to actually play games. Trackmania Turbo's Track Builder, while full of options to make some really cool stuff, is not for me. I'm happy it's here, allowing me to experience the best the community of gamers put out there, but (on consoles it least) it feels tedious and relatively unnecessary given the amount of pre-built tracks on offer. Auto-generating courses is good for a few minutes, but I'm unlikely to dabble more than that.
Trackmania Turbo isn't a showpiece title in the same vein as DriveClub but the bright colours, crisp image quality and incredible sense of speed lend it an arcadey appearance that is impossible not to enjoy. On the Rollercoaster-themed courses the whole thing can be rather dazzling, with the camera auto-switching to Bumper Cam as you defy gravity thanks to magnetised road surfaces. There's an elegant beauty to a car sliding around a corner at insane speed, and Trackmania Turbo has this in abundance.
I can already see that competing against friends to fastest times is going to be a bit of an addiction, again like Trials, and for only £25 I can't see many reasons not to give Trackmania Turbo a whirl.
Version Tested: PS4
We’ve re-launched our Trackmania Turbo review following its inclusion in the line-up. You can download it for free on the PlayStation Store in April. Trackmania Turbo Reviewt's hard to go back and forth from an arcade racer to simulation racer, but when it comes to a time trial racer then you have another spanner thrown in for good measure. While you have your circuits or roads to travel along, Trackmania Turbo opts for a custom affair full of loops, drops, twists, speed boosts, jumps, and it's something that makes even Mario Kart look plain in comparison. The stunts you pull in Trackmania Turbo are beyond anything you have played before. To get into Trackmania Turbo quickly you need to head into the campaign to flesh out the many different driving styles required to take on the daring stunt devils of the world online. Faced with that proposition are the 200 time-trial races before you, each requiring a bronze, silver, or a gold medal to continue to the next stage - or trackmaster if you're that fast!There are a total of five series - white, green, blue, red, and the extremely difficult black.
Each of these series are split into four stages (or settings) comprising of ten time-trials in each. To unlock the next stage, you need to get all bronze, silver, or gold medals to continue. In the case of the Black series you must get gold on every single race in the other series to even unlock the series let alone master the tracks in the Black series too.The four stages are taken from past games. There's Canyon Drift, Down and Dirty Valley, Rollercoaster Lagoon, and the infamous International Stadium taken directly from the free Trackmania Nations game. These four stages all have their own vehicle for you to wrestle the neck off. Racing online is very different to the challenges, instead of a series to play through you have lobbies to join. These are set up by players that have either made custom tracks, or are using the current challenge tracks to race on.
Before joining any room, you can see how many players have joined (usually a maximum of 100 players per room), the country hosting the room, and the stages being used. If you care about the difficulty of players you'll be going up against then (on the far right) is a level of the opponents you will go up against, this is based on your world ranking.If there's a particular user you race frequently with on their servers, then you can favourite that room and join it at any time instead of sifting through a massive list of rooms that fills up pretty quickly. You can also create your own rooms with a set track list to help set up races that much quicker.When the races start, it triggers just like before, 3. Except this time there are hundreds of ghost cars on screen at once! It is very unusual for a game to show all 100 ghost cars at once on screen and it can obscure your view at the start, but once the time-trial gets further into the session then it is much easier to see the road - but seeing people fly off the road in all manner of directions is a laugh in itself.
If you have several friends, then you can always create a private room to invite them in. Warning: in this mode your friends will become your frenemies! Or if you want them to stay as your buddy then grab two controllers and race in the same car, which sounds odd but that's exactly what you can do.
When driving around the track you drive like you need to, but to get around a corner you need your co-pilot to help you! If you turn right they need to turn right, if you accelerate then they need to do the same. All of your inputs are effectively halved meaning that coordination is of the utmost importance. Fancy more multiplayer mayhem without wanting to go online? Then as long as you have four controllers then you can have a four-way splitscreen to have even more friends to shout at in the near vicinity.It is all about competitiveness and Trackmania Turbo brings it out of you no matter the kind of person that plays it. To make things even more competitive, you can create a track that is so bonkers and twisted that you might wonder how someone might get around that track - ever!
You do not need much, but the more the better. Stick rpg cheat. The car is like the skateboard exceptfaster and cooler.Easy money:-First, start a bank account. You can then hot wire the car.
Throw it up online and see if anyone can manage it, no matter how people fail at that track, there will always be the odd one or two people that surprise the hundreds and thousands that fail.If only creating a decent track was that simple, but you are given only a few pieces to create a track from, which are typically a straight, a rise or drop that levels off (so you can't get a smooth gradual elevation change), a sharp or medium corner, a boost, a checkpoint, or a finish line. Considering what was available in even Trackmania Nations all those years ago, this is very basic in comparison. There are small variations of each of the track parts including going from a double lane to a single lane, or depending on the environment you would get a dirt track or a road. And with a couple parts on each settings saying “blocked by terrain”, even if you have that part somewhere in the middle of the sky, you kind of wonder if that part is ever available to use at all.The only track that can be made somewhat different to the others is Rollercoaster Lagoon, and even then, despite being able to make tracks at funny angles, they are essentially the same pieces – a straight and a bend – but at least you can create a half-loop. None of the available options are even available for a jump, twists, actual loops, or anything that was available in the campaign.
A missed opportunity here.Lastly is the framerate, which is oh so close to being a solid 60FPS (and at most times it is), but at some points you can see a noticeable drop in frames, even if it's only slight. As the game is a must for a high framerate, having these dips can be an anomaly that is better out of site than present. Thankfully it happens at certain sections so you can change your driving style in accordance to where it is ahead of time.