Refined and responsive, Trackmania Turbo

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“ Trackmania Turbo’s greatest victory is perhaps its ability to be both incredibly simple and extremely deep.

The huge number of national flag liveries for these are a cute touch.

Short and Sweet

Anakin was right; sand sucks.

Chasing Ghosts

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That’s best exemplified by a course you race early on that says it can be completed in less than 20 seconds. It’s a single corner, a gentle slalom, a large jump that can’t be taken at full throttle (thanks to a letterbox-esque gap,) and two turbo-boost pads on the landing ramp. That’s it. Yet of all Turbo’s terrific and tricky stages, this one is a highlight for me.It was haunting me. I couldn’t find the fractions of a second I needed to break my personal-best time. Every extra centimetre between my car and the wall on the first corner was time lost. Every unnecessary degree of steering input snaking through the slalom was time lost. Every excessive bit of speed leaving the jump resulted in a late landing and cost me more crucial hundredths of a second. I don’t know how many restarts I made – well over 100; maybe double that. I was consumed by it. This is how Turbo works – how it burrows its way under the skin. Just one more restart. Just one more medal. Just one more spot on the leaderboards.Trackmania Turbo’s greatest victory is perhaps its ability to be both incredibly simple and extremely deep. It’s very easy to pick up and begin driving – go, stop, and turn are the extent of its straightforward control scheme – but it’s anything but superficial. Beneath that instant accessibility lurks a truly nuanced world of consistent physics that needs to be adapted to for any hope of setting record times.What’s more, the handling dynamics vary across the four different vehicles available (each restricted to its own track environment) and the surfaces across which they race. The NASCAR Modified-style racer is my favourite car by far; composed at absurd speeds and capable of long, predictable powerslides it’s a perfect fit for the snaking bends, huge jumps, and gigantic vert ramps and loops of Turbo’s ‘Canyon Grand Drift’ location.I’ve also enjoyed the F1-inspired open-wheeler, which feels planted and grippy. It competes in an entirely different set of courses, the ‘International Stadium’, which is packed with futuristic elevated raceways, massive stunt objects, and supercross-style dirt sections.I’m less enamoured with the two remaining vehicles – a Baja-style Beetle racer and a stubby dune buggy – both of which I found a bit too fussy and twitchy to enjoy as much, even after several days to get used to them. The dune buggy, in particular, feels like a slot car on the magnetic, gravity-defying stretches of raised track at Turbo’s ‘Rollercoaster Lagoon’ but I grew to truly dislike how it copes with sand or polished timber decking, both of which might as well be ice. I certainly concede varied grip levels are a carefully designed part of the challenge but there were several courses I eventually found more frustrating than fun as a result of this.Turbo’s progression system is actually very linear, forcing players to work through 10 events per location, and 40 total to open the next tier of events. The minor annoyance here is that this means after completing a series of 10 ‘Grand Canyon Drift’ events, the next 10 ‘Grand Canyon Drift’ courses are gated pending the completion of 30 entirely separate events in the remaining three environments. I do wonder whether it would’ve been more logical to allow us to progress through single locations after success in them, rather than making access to the next batch of tracks at one particular environment contingent entirely on 30 more medals all gleaned elsewhere.To Turbo’s credit, however, even when I found myself somewhat impatient at the forced switching of locales and vehicles, it’s rarely irritating. A large part of that is the length of the tracks themselves, which mostly range between 30 to 60 seconds (it takes trial and error to be able to complete them within the required times but the restart button is instant). Developer Nadeo has also wedged in a system allowing us to effectively secure a medal and move on from courses that are proving troublesome provided we can earn the medal below it three times.There’s a staggering 200 of these courses spread across the four areas but after factoring in Turbo’s fully-featured track maker system this is really just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The track maker is available in several levels of construction complexity (beginners can just bung a bunch of pre-made pieces together like a virtual Scalextric set while experts can hone every track tile and billboard) or you can just let it create tracks for you automatically. The auto-generated stages are a bit of a crapshoot – the ones my game created were sometimes a bit of a mess – but the tools are definitely there to create tracks as wildly fun and frantic as the ones the Nadeo has crafted itself. The big miss here is the unforgivable lack of any obvious in-game browser for user-created tracks, which instead need to be selected from a website and fed to your game via some Ubisoft Club bollocks.Alongside Turbo’s mammoth assortment of tracks lies its terrifically broad multiplayer component. There’s the bizarre but fun Double Driver mode, which places control of a single car in the hands of two separate players and applies their inputs evenly (even when they cancel each other out). There’s four-player splitscreen (a wonderful and welcome relic of the glorious era of same screen multiplayer that most developers have forgotten even existed) which seems smoothly handled without any glaringly obvious technical concessions.Best of all, however, is the online multiplayer racing where up to 100 players are competing in real-time to set the best time on any given track. The result is a mad torrent of ghost cars flowing around twisting tracks like a school of frightened fish. The first 30 seconds are always hilarious as dozens of players fall foul to the same unexpected obstacles simultaneously. I did encounter a frustrating bug here on PlayStation 4; at the conclusion of a race my current ranking information was displayed on screen but refused to disappear before the next event started, leaving a slab of white text obscuring the subsequent race. It only disappeared when I left the room and rejoined the event.I do love how granular this ranking info is, though, and for me it was the prime reason I became completely obsessed with the course I described at the beginning of this review. Not only could I see where I ranked in the world, but I could also see where I ranked in Australia, and even where I ranked in my home state. My complaint here would be although it’s clear how many players are still above you, Turbo doesn’t make the effort post-race to show you their exact times so it’s never obvious just how much faster you need to be to ascend the leaderboards.