Racing games. Drive a car as fast as you can around a track, win credits, buy new cars to do it faster. Rinse and repeat. Love it or hate it, those are the basic mechanics behind most racing titles, especially since these days there appears to be very little variety between them. Press releases usually highlight licensed vehicles such as Ferrari and Porsche (but never Skoda, for some reason) or city-based circuits that are in reality just a custom racetrack littered with famous landmarks. Some developers however have tried to buck this trend (Burnout Paradise and Test Drive Unlimited) whilst featuring timed routes and tradable cars. These titles had more emphasis on exploration and discovery, a little like Driver or Grand Theft Auto without the walky bits. Not Trackmania United Forever though.
Taking the same formula from a few years ago with the original Trackmania, United Forever throws in more tracks, vehicles and options whilst maintaining the community spirit that surrounds the series. A browser lurks within to view all the fan-made skins, mods and tracks, and every race uploads your time to online scoreboards so that single player becomes a ranking battle against the rest of the world. Whilst this isn’t a revelation in a time when internet play is the current fashion, you’re just a click away from thumbing through the community section and so it feels connected with the big wide world.
Four modes of play that await your choosing all show why the Trackmania series leans more into having fun than being realistic. Races across harsh terrain, jumps so big that your stomach folds at the thought of them and tracks that twist upside down are typical and aplenty. My personal preference however is to have a handful of larger tracks with diverse features than oodles of short, 15-second sprint races with one feature in the track. Getting a fast time on a course that has many different corners of varying difficulty that lasts a good three minutes takes more skill than shorter sprint races, but then skill isn’t really needed here. Tracks require simple nudges from left to right than sticking to strict racing lines, powerslides and drafting behind opposition racers, often with something like a huge jump or an upside down section to really define it.
Platform races set you on a difficult course with the aim of reaching the end without using too many resets. General trial and error apply here and I didn’t see anything more than a distraction from the main racing mode. Stunt mode is much the same only completion relies more on luck than anything else as you spin and flip your car around trying to earn points. Puzzle events are a particular favourite and well thought out. Using the track editor, you’re given a set of checkpoints and then challenged to plot the quickest possible route between them, and then get into your vehicle to take advantage of it. A novel idea which, unlike the previous two modes, is a welcome distraction from endless bouts of racing.
A satisfying selection of vehicles are on offer all with varying degrees of control. Nothing is surprising really as some have twitchy handling, others can reach death defying speeds whilst more feature heavy steering. Choosing the right sort can obviously save seconds on lap times, but there’s nothing that needs to be grown into as they all behave the way you’d expect them to.
Trackmania United Forever gives you the tools for destruction and a hefty amount of options to disperse your actions with. Offering basic yet not neglected visuals, music and ambient sounds, it’s the perfect way to dip into a mindless racer should the current crop of licensed and realistic titles be wearing thin. Usually with these sort of alternative racers the developer will give their creation the ability to shoot weapons, but Trackmania rises above this to keep the action strictly as racing, and entices players back to shave more seconds off their times. I’m not the sort of gamer that enjoys endless bouts of racing against the clock - I’m more of a GRID man myself - but like its game modes, Trackmania is a worthy distraction for a few minutes at a time from the mainstream.
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