Reviewed on:
Tagar Systems' DeZinor Media Center PC with AMD Athlon 3000+, 512 mb of RAM and Nvidia GeForce FX 5700 video card, running Microsoft Windows Media Center EditionAlso available for:
The Good:
Relatively simple to play, doesn't require high-end graphics card or powerful computer.The Bad:
Complicated track editor, poor design, not enough variety, kludgy game play.The Verdict:
TrackMania might be fun for a little while, but gamers will likely tire of it fairly quickly.
REVIEW: If you're like I was as a kid, playing with Mattel's Hot Wheels was the highlight of your day (next to watching Star Trek, of course). Hooking up different pieces of track and creating a giant loop or huge jump for your cars to go off at high speed was a thrill, which usually involved stacks of books or other furniture to add to the general mayhem. Wouldn't it be great it if there was a video game where you could recreate that kind of fun? Unfortunately, while TrackMania from Enlight comes close, it isn't that game. There are plenty of well-done racing games, but when it gets right down to it, most offer little more than different tracks and different models of car — although you could argue that Grand Theft Auto is a kind of racing game involving criminals such as mobsters, drug dealers and prostitutes. In any case, TrackMania seems to offer so much more, including the ability to design and build your own Hot Wheels-style track (interestingly enough, Mattel was sued successfully by an inventor who claimed that the company stole the idea for Hot Wheels, but I digress...). But while it is fun in some ways, TrackMania is also disappointing. One of the first things you're likely to notice about the game is that the interface is so sparse that it's bordering on crude. The startup menu is all garish colours and block letters that look a lot like an early DOS game, and this colour and design scheme (if you could call it that) are carried through the entire game. In an age when games have opening credits and title sequences that are as elaborate as entire games used to be, TrackMania is definitely a throwback. Of course, that also means you'll be able to play it even on an older machine running Windows 98 with a Pentium III and a 16MB video card, but it still looks awfully sparse for this day and age of PC gaming. The game itself is similarly short on detail. Although some of the surroundings on the tracks you can race in the time-trial portion of the game are well-done — such as the sky and the far-away mountains in the winter racing scene — there are other parts of the game that are childishly simple by comparison. Even the cars themselves lack detail and don't develop any kind of bangs or dents no matter how hard you smash them up. Perhaps the designers wanted to harken back to the days of the indestructible Hot Wheel cars — or maybe they just didn't spend the time to make it better. The way the cars drive (and there are only three cars with different skins: a truck, a Dukes of Hazzard-style roadster and a more traditional racing car) is also rudimentary, compared with other contemporary racing games. In fact, all you can do is accelerate, brake, and turn right or left. You can't do much if you land on your roof but hit the reset key and start the race again. If you fall off the track — which in most cases has only a short wall or barrier running all the way around it — you can't get back on unless you try to ram into something and bounce your way on back over the wall. That can be frustrating. The way the cars handle is also more like a remote control car than a real vehicle, which is perhaps also a tribute to the old Hot Wheels or model cars. But it makes for a strikingly un-lifelike game when you're driving, particularly with the lack of other features such as the ability to skid and the general lack of detail. The crudeness of the design — or the simplicity, if you're in a charitable mood — extends to the audio as well. The music consists of several different canned jingle-style tunes, including a guitar fuzz riff that quickly becomes irritating. And what about the design elements of the game? Well, the game designers have tried to add interest by requiring you to collect "coppers" by racing pre-designed tracks, which you can then spend on different parts for your own layout. But given the tracks available to race, this process quickly becomes tedious. The interface for the track-design part of the game is just as crude as the rest. It consists of a bird's-eye view of a grid of squares, with a camera control — so you can rotate to see your track from different angles — and a design control that lets you move pieces you select to different squares on the grid. Unfortunately, the layout process is far from intuitive, since you have to click on arrow buttons in order to move things around (or use the keyboard cursor keys), and then click on the word "draw" in order to place them where you want. If you hit the "enter" key under the mistaken impression that this might put the piece where you want, you are catapulted into the racing part of the game to test the track you are designing — which may only consist of a single piece with a desert around it. If you want to, you can drive off into the desert (or the snowscape, depending on where you happen to be) for quite a distance while the game thinks you are racing, until you simply run into an invisible wall. One of the problems with this game is that it seems caught between two markets. If you are an adult who is into racing games, TrackMania will strike you as unrefined and simple to the point of being childish and uninteresting. If you buy this game for a child who likes toy cars, it will be so frustrating to try and design anything or race it that he or she will likely get bored and quit ... or torment you by getting you to design a track or win the time-trial race. The bottom line is that TrackMania might seem like good value for the money if you got it for a few bucks in a bargain bin, but otherwise don't bother.
