Trackmania's thrilling speed and simplistic style make it an easily accessible racer that will thrive on a dedicated, creative community who have the patience to navigate its subscription model and basic menus.
Few racing games are as simple in execution as Trackmania. Abandoning the complexities and realistic slant of simulators like Gran Turismo or Forza and stripped of the wild mechanics of arcade racers like Need for Speed or Mario Kart, Trackmania primarily wants players to go fast. And faster. And faster.
On PC, I can play Trackmania with one hand. My fingers on the WASD keys turn the sleek car, propel it forward, and cause it to stop or reverse–if such tragic maneuvers are needed, of course. When I first realized this after previewing Trackmania last month, I was hooked.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy drifting and boosting, throwing blue shells, running from the law, and putting my foot on the nitro. But real life does not afford me the absurd situations a racing game can. However, when it comes to throwing all these mechanics together in a racing soup to achieve and maintain a first place finish… well I fall apart. In Trackmania, I often would not come in first place or get a gold medal but the reason for my “sluggish” pace usually resulted in a lack of knowledge about a track or pressing down on the acceleration for too long.
One of Trackmania‘s first training courses provides an illuminating example on how deadly accurate a player must be to achieve top rankings in the world. Consisting of two slight turns, the tutorial track is meant to give players a feel for how speed can be maintained and lost during a curve. It can be finished in about 10 seconds and awards a gold medal to those who finish it in 8 seconds or less. It sounds easy but players must execute a near precise amount of acceleration and pausing, rarely letting the speed indicator on the back of the car tick down.
Infuriating initially feels like the right word to describe failure in the opening salvo of tracks created by developer Ubisoft Nadeo. Acting as both an educational tool and a test of those lessons, players are not forced to master Trackmania‘s design but are, at the least, required to understand them. The 50 tracks available to all players vacillate between simple to devastating. Short tracks can pummel players with tricky speed bumps while long tracks might serve as an endurance test with multiple checkpoints. Near the end of these circuits, I felt like I better understood how best to maintain momentum when the game got difficult, but it didn’t mean that I succeeded in my attempts.
To diversify its mechanics beyond controlling top speed, Ubisoft Nadeo implements multiple features that make the race to the finish line more interesting. Tracks will be populated with various kinds of boosts or hindrances that can further be complimented with hazards or structural changes in the track. A track may be relatively flat but be lined with turbo boost pads that turn the car into a sonic bullet that must dodge a grid of pillars. A 90-degree angle may be toppled with a pad that sends the car flying but if you don’t maintain the right speed, you’ll end up spending too long in the air and wasting time. One track disabled my engine, preventing me from accelerating, only to force me to maintain enough speed past obstacles and bumpy roads to crawl up a sharp hill.
Sections of tracks can contain ice roads, dirt roads, or bumpy sections that can throw off balance. Loops can be fallen off of and players will have to figure out how to literally drive on pieces of road that act as walls. Though it all sounds complicated, nothing is further from the truth. Trackmania‘s obstacles and course flow are easy and practical to understand. After racing over them a few times, players should come to an understanding to how their car will handle nearly every situation. An advanced driver will recognize how to not let these obstacles come in the way of a fast time.
Where Trackmania becomes a fully-realized time-attack racer, however, is in its community features. One of the game’s main draws is its painless track editor where players can use the same tools as Ubisoft Nadeo to design their own tracks. Despite being a player that yearns to express some kind of creativity in games that allow it, I just don’t have the time or patience for those kinds of tools. Trackmania offers one of the simplest tool sets for players to take advantage of. Keep in mind, these tools aren’t simple because they are basic, they are simple because they are easy to understand.
In a matter of minutes I was able to create a competent track with elevated sections and plenty of curves. I never felt frustrated or confused by what blocks I was placing on the map. Switching over to the advanced editor, I was slightly more overwhelmed because they are several more options, therefore a great deal more screen real estate taken up by specific blocks. By playing the developer-designed tracks in Trackmania, I was able to easily recognize what a specific block of track was. It’s truly an indication of how cohesive of a whole the game really is, not to mention how beneficial a simpler visual design can make a racer.
Trackmania at its most basic exists as a free-to-play game. Without investing any money, players are given access to the training courses and a seasonal rotation of “campaign” tracks that arrive every three months. Additionally, the simple map editor is made available so free players can get a taste of what editing their own tracks is like.
Community is and will be the driving force behind Trackmania and for that reason, it’s difficult to recommend the free version. In short, the free version feels like a demo of what Trackmania truly has to offer, primarily because it lacks many of the social features and community engagement fans of the series may expect. For $9.99 a year, players will have access to the Standard Access tier, granting access to most of the live features that Trackmania has to offer. From live tournaments, racing with the ghosts of other players, to playing through curated “Tracks of the Day” created by other players, Standard Access feels like a fair offer if Trackmania engages you enough to race through potentially thousands of custom tracks.
During my time playing Trackmania for review, the community as a whole hasn’t been loosed into the full map editor, therefore the number of custom tracks weren’t as deep as it may be in a few months. Still, it didn’t take away from the fact that people were already designing tracks from other games like Mario Kart or crafting dastardly puzzles with dead ends and traps. To miss out on access to these tracks would be a shame. It might be wise for Ubisoft to have periodic events that allow free players to access the full range of community edits or Club features. Though I’m impressed by Ubisoft Nadeo’s existing tracks, I think the player base will be responsible for some of the best Trackmania has to offer. Because the editor is so simple and some of the initial created tracks are so promising, even if they can be a bit unfair or unwieldy, it’s hard to see a person who really enjoys Trackmania at least not dropping down $9.99 for one year of these features.
Club Access is the highest tier that players can buy into at $29.99 for one year or $59.99 for three years. Club Access is the complete Trackmania package but justifies the additional cost by allowing players to engage in Clubs. Outside of Club VIP ghosts and the highest ranking tournaments Ubisoft Nadeo offers, Club Access doesn’t take away from the experience of Standard Access very much. Players will be able to join or create an unlimited number of Clubs that can be both public or private. Having access to Clubs means that players can group up with each other to create custom campaigns and race with each other for the glory of fastest times. Additionally, Clubs feature the ability to create custom car skins and implement custom designs into tracks. Many Clubs seen in my time during Trackmania seemed like placeholders for experimentation while a handful actually were budding hubs for similar-minded players.
Again, I think that players who spend time with the free version of Trackmania or have experience with the series will know whether or not they are going to make the investment and pay for access. At the minimum, a paid model will help support the efforts of Ubisoft Nadeo to keep injecting content into the game. At the worst, it has the chance to splinter the community in ways that won’t support growth. If the payment model is not completely viable, I’m sure changes will be made, especially to the free version. The ability to have player-hosted servers and tournaments for Clubs strikes me as a kind of premium option that many will find worthy of purchase.
More importantly, I think Ubisoft Nadeo has a bit of work to do with the menu presentation in Trackmania. When trying to upload and create my own custom skins, I found a lot of issue figuring out how to save them or upload them to the Club I created. A lot of navigation seems to be done through specific folders and with the game’s interface, it wasn’t very intuitive. I especially think some effort needs to be put into tooltips for menus to help players better grasp what they are working with. I enjoy the basic setup of the main menus but when diving into the minutiae, it’s hard to get a clear picture without more practice.
Trackmania, despite its bulky payment structure and occasionally clumsy navigation, is one of the sleekest racing experiences I’ve played. The bite-sized length of many tracks make the game easily digestible. Better yet, the game surrounds you with a visual flair where everything on screen pops and whizzes past with grace. The game loads quick and allows players to screw up in devastating ways and reset their progress from the beginning or at any checkpoint without a hitch. Over the course of playing Trackmania I became entranced with its serene, jumpy electronic music that drowned out any distractions and helped me focus on that constant desire for more and more speed. “One more time,” I would tell myself after barely missing out on a gold medal or failing a particularly sinister but creative track. By being intuitive and inviting in all the right ways Trackmania has all the tools it needs to propel itself to victory. Now it just needs the community to keep pushing put their foot on the gas.
