Sure, the single player campaign is fun - and actually acts as a pretty good "tutorial" to teach you how to handle both the vehicles and the various track features you might encounter in your career - but it's the various multiplayer features that are the real star here. TrackMania isn't really a game intended to be played alone, either. And with Valley, that side of things is better than it has ever been thanks to enhanced support for Steam, including Workshop. That description doesn't really do TrackMania justice, however, because aside from a hefty single player campaign that will have you gnashing your teeth for weeks as you miss that Gold Medal time by a hundredth of a second for the fiftieth time that hour, TrackMania is - and always has been - one of the most extendible, moddable games in existence.
Oh, and the tracks are frequently complete physical impossibilities, consisting of rollercoaster loops and corkscrews, vertigo-inducing jumps and finish lines that tend to either see drivers hurtling straight into an extremely solid wall, or flinging themselves off ridiculously high cliffs. Then throw out pretty much every convention of that genre - time limits, racing against other cars, lap-based circuits - and replace it with an experience focused almost entirely on point-to-point time trials against ghosts. On its highest graphical settings, Valley looks spectacular, with an impressive motion blur effect giving a real sense of the ludicrous speed the cars are going.įor those of you who are yet to experience the joy that is TrackMania, let me explain.
Because releasing it this way actually has a few nice benefits for players: firstly, you get to play each new environment as it's finished, rather than having to wait for a complete package secondly, each environment has clearly had a lot of care and attention given to it - something that's particularly true with Valley, easily the best-looking installment in the series to date thirdly, the pricing of each environment is rather friendly on the wallet, which is nice.
Since Canyon first came out, we've seen Stadium, which is a remake of the popular environment first seen in the free TrackMania Nations, and now we come to the latest release, Valley.Īm I still concerned about TrackMania 2? No. Rather than a single game encompassing several different environments and vehicles, as all previous installments were, it seemed publisher Ubisoft had decided TrackMania 2 would be better off split up and sold to players piecemeal, beginning with the new "Canyon" environment and proceeding through several others. I won't lie, though, I was a little concerned when TrackMania 2 - actually the fifth game in the series - was first announced. The Factsīoth Pete and Mike's review copies were acquired at their own expense. Ever since that time, I've been an enthusiastic follower of the Mania series, which has since added a first-person shooter to its lineup, with a role-playing game to follow at some indefinite point in the future.
But it is true that this first experience with the series was enough to well and truly put small French developer Nadeo on the map for me. This, as it happened, turned out to be a somewhat life-changing decision.
I remembered a friend of mine had played an earlier installment in the series - TrackMania Sunrise, as I recall - and really enjoyed it, so I picked up TrackMania United for very little money out of mild curiosity. My first encounter with the TrackMania series was as a Steam sale special.