BY AMIT BARAN ROY | Trackmania Turbo; the fast, frenetic and intense arcade racing game has returned to PC and made its first appearance on Consoles (since 2009’s Trackmania Wii) on March 24th. But since its launch, negative reviews has flooded the Steam community with all sorts of lacking features that the game has as compared to its previous versions. People are disappointed that- Trackmania Turbo doesn’t let you customize your avatar, cars and horns nor it lets you edit your nickname to suit your clan. Not only this, people are even more frustrated by the fact that there is no provision of dedicated servers and the 100 players cap in Online play. After having played Trackmania Turbo for 8+ hours, I feel the game doesn’t really suck without them and that it has a new beginning in the Trackmania series.

Till now, the trend of customizing cars and horns was fun and exciting but those are not what makes a Trackmania game. It is the GAMEPLAY that stands out as the unique selling point for all Trackmania games and that is exactly on which has tried to concentrate in Trackmania Turbo. It was high time for Trackmania to get rid of those unnecessary extras and return with a game where the focus can be on the adrenaline racing itself. That’s what Turbo is special about. The aim of Trackmania Turbo is not to piss off your opponents with silly customizations but to focus and get the best out of the serpentine tracks. This is evident from the frustrating number of restarts that one has to make to beat himself and set their personal best on the track. What I mean to say is that the game is excessively compulsive and that is good. It makes a player to master his driving skills according to the specific environments and rides, and achieve that shit piece of gold at the end of every race (which is sometimes impossible). In multiplayer and online mode, the opponents appear as virtual ghost players and by no chance there can be any collision with each other. Thus, the game is strictly based on beating the personal best and setting the lowest lap times possible.

Next issue is the absence of dedicated servers. Until now, the Trackmania games were PC based where players could host their own servers and customize the matches. But its gone now and too some extent it is bad. But hey, lets not make so much a fuss about it and try considering the positive side too. This move by Nadeo is only because they want to form a new community where the console players can join in too. One should not compare this game with the old Trackmania games where the community consisted of only PC users. For all this long, veterans have always complained about the lack of players in this game and that the game is not able to drive enough players. But now it is them who are driving away lot of potential players with all the negative reviews. I like change and feel it is a good move to form a community with console players that can bring more challenges and fun. Hence, the crap that ‘consoles dumbing down PC games’ is bullshit.

Let us also not forget that the game provides a massive 200 single player tracks set in four different environments- Canyon, Valley, Rollercoaster Lagoon and Stadium, with 4 different cars racing down the tracks at blistering speeds. Never before all four environments were included in a single game. Turbo provides one of the best single player mode in the entire Trackmania series. People may feel the excessive restarts to be mundane but NOT HERE- this is what Trackmania is all about. Players have to master their driving skills such that they won’t lose that extra second due to traversing that extra centimetre between their ride and the single wall corner. Seamless drifting, powerslides and perfect take off angles are the striking features of the game. You get a degree wrong and there you go, press the restart button. Whats more, the game retains the versatile Trackbuilder mode where you can build your all favorite tracks as well randomly generate tracks on any of the four environments and upload them to play with others. Among the multiplayer options, there is the brilliant splitscreen mode where upto 4 players can play together on a single screen. Also, for the first time a Trackmania game has provided the Double Driver mode where 2 drivers can control a single car. It’s a complete bizarre with two players controlling a single car using synchronized instincts and it is FUN.

On the other hand, Trackmania Turbo definitely has a lot of downsides that can’t be ignored. First of all the useless Uplay crap. shouldn’t have forced Uplay into this game when it is sold on Steam itself. Other cons like absence of leaderboards in Multiplayer, terrible GUI and map editor in Trackbuilder mode, controller remap issues etc are pulling the game down that should have been fixed by Nadeo before launch. But, issues were prevalent in previous Trackmania games too. Trackmania Turbo is dominated by its exquisite Gameplay and stunning sets of tracks and races. I feel the game doesn’t deserve to be pushed down to a pit due to those negative issues that may not matter much at the end. One should not enforce their opinions about Turbo based on previous Trackmania games and prevent others from exploring this enthralling arcade racing game.

THE PROGNOSIS

Trackmania Turbo is fast, frenetic, aggressive, fun and colorful. It is frustratingly compulsive which I actually like. It indeed lacks lots of customizations and doesn’t have dedicated servers as compared to previous Trackmania games. But, I believe these issues are not enough to bring down a game whose speciality lies in its Gameplay. The game needed a cleanup with more focus on the adrenaline arcade racing gameplay which is exactly what we experience in Turbo. If you are new to Trackmania, you will definitely like the game and it will be a perfect buy for you. One advice would be to not listen to many people out there. If you are a Trackmania veteran, you will also like the game until you end up comparing the game with its predecessors and it is then, when opinions starts to differ. Every Trackmania title is special in itself and it deserves to be tested out by all the arcade racing fans out there. Instead of the low ratings that the game received (to some extent it deserves), I would still highly recommend it.