Trackmania Turbo is an arcade-style racing video game developed by Nadeo and published by Ubisoft. The game features a lot of different variety of tracks across various landscapes and it also marks the series’ return to consoles after a long time.
As a racing video game, it never takes itself too seriously with its wacky and crazy tracks featuring gravity defying gameplay. The game is divided in four different locales including Canyon Grand Drift, Down & Dirty Valley, RollerCoaster Lagoon and International Stadium. Each of these locations has around 50 different tracks that can be played either in solo or in split-screen co-op. Adding up all of these tracks, there are around 200 official tracks available for a race. This doesn’t count the random track generator and the TrackBuilder Workshop.
If you are disappointed by the variety of tracks, you can try your luck in the TrackBuilder Workshop. The TrackBuilder Workshop gives the players the freedom to create their own crazy tracks and share them online. These tracks can also be played in split-screen. If you have got a knack for creating tracks, then you can give it a go. It can be a fun time waster as well.
In term of just the main campaign, the game has around 200 tracks to select, as revealed earlier. These tracks all offer Bronze, Silver and Gold for extra challenge and replay value. If you want to get Gold in all of the tracks, you will have to master each and every turn of the respective track. Fortunately getting a Gold is made easier by the fact that you can toggle a Ghost car for each of the ranking, which is helpful when you are trying to improve your lap times. You can take your track mastery to one step further by getting the Trackmaster medal on each level. Getting all medals in the 200 tracks of Trackmania is ridiculously tough but should satisfy the hardcore players.
The game also features an online multiplayer that lets the player either join their friends for online arcade-style racing, or join various available public rooms. These rooms are all presented in a neat list upon selection and feature the country of origin as well as the number of players and difficulty level. It is easy to find our required room using the available list. Players can also add a select room to their favorite or create them own room.
The racing aspect of the game is well done. The controls are simple and easy to grasp which makes it a great game to play with newcomers. Since the game offers split-screen multiplayer for upto 4 players, it can be a fun game for a party. Although the split-screen mode appears to be pretty barren in term of variety of challenges, players will have full access to the 200 tracks that are available in the campaign. Some of these official tracks can be insanely fun and never feel repetitive. There are a lot of crazy tracks with huge jumps and gravity defying stunts, which are fun in short busts of gameplay.
If you want to take it one step further with friends, you can try the Double Driver mode. This mode gives the control of the car to two players at the same time and requires both of them to synchronize their moves. Communication is the key to getting success in Double Driver mode.
The objective in Trackmania is simple, reach the end of the Lap. Some of the tracks are incredibly short and can be finished in seconds while others feature multiple laps around the Track. There is also a system in place on some of these laps that results in the engine getting shutdown until the player is able to pass a select checkpoint. In addition to the engine shutdown, players will have to defy gravity to travel across the track at times and this requires speed and precision. The game usually automatically switches to first person view mode during some of these gravity defying stunts.
Trackmania Turbo also features a random track generator that theoretically offers unlimited tracks. Although as I tested it out, I was disappointed to see that the tracks that are usually generated randomly are mostly a disjointed mess. The best part of the random track generator is that each of the tracks is generated right in front of the player, and it honestly doesn’t take that long to generate a random track. Still, it would have been great to get a good and fun track generated this way. Nevertheless, it is a nice feature to have in case you want to experiment before building your own track.
Trackmania Turbo might not be a graphical stunning game but it does perform well. It runs at native 1080p on the PS4 and 900p on the Xbox One while both versions of the game run at 60 fps. Even in split-screen mode, the game appears to run at smooth 60 fps without any technical issues, which is great for a racing game.
If you are a fan of arcade-style racing games and if you want to try Trackmania on consoles, this game is for you. It features a healthy dose of content and along with the addition of the trackbuilder, the user generated content has potential to increase the replay value. The addition of split-screen is definitely welcome in an era where they are increasingly rare to find in a game.
Trackmania Turbo is available now on the PC, PS4 and Xbox One. It was developed by Nadeo and published by Ubisoft. This review covers the PS4 version of the game.
