At first glance, TUF appears to be a pretty straightforward racing game, but this is not a game in which you line up with a field of 15 opponents, burn through a dozen laps and try to be first across the finish line. Instead, the racing action of TUF keeps the focus firmly set on time trials. You can choose to race against ghost cars and, depending on how well you do, you'll be awarded a bronze, silver or gold medal. More tracks unlock as you accumulate more medals. Bronze and silver times are usually fairly easy to achieve, but you'll need to spend a bit of time with a track before getting your fingers on a gold medal. Tracks are grouped by their difficulty level, starting with the easy-peasy white tracks and ending with the nerve-shattering black tracks.
The game plays like a blend of slot car racing and Wacky Racers. Cars leap, fly, bounce, squeak around corners on two wheels, ricochet off safety barriers and generally hurtle about in a fashion that would see them quickly reduced to scrap in the real world. It can take a little while to get used to the game's cavalier attitude, but once you settle into its frenetic, adrenalin-fuelled rythmns, you'll start to have fun.
One way to hasten the morning commute.
Once you venture beyond TUF's basic time trial stages, you'll start to discover the real appeal of the game. Platform levels introduce some of the challenges of platform-based gaming, placing increasingly death-defying layouts of jumps and plummets between you and the finish line. Going flat out will usually end in disaster, so some real finesse is required to get to the end in one piece, and with a decent time.
Puzzle levels take advantage of the game's in-built track editor. The editor can be used at any time to build any track you fancy, but the Puzzle levels restrict the number of track pieces you have available to build a track that will take you through a set number of checkpoints and to the end before a time limit expires. It's far more tricky than it sounds, and we found it easily the most compelling part of the whole TUF package. Trying to work out how to get across a river, up three levels to a checkpoint and then across the line with only a handful of straights, bends and ramps can provide some deeply satisfying puzzling, and that's even before you have to go and drive around your hand-built creation in under ten seconds. Cracking stuff.
We found the Stunt levels a bit more problematic. The challenge here is to fling yourself about a variety of closed arenas that have been populated with jumps, bumps, loops and all manner of leapy-crashy-bashy obstacles. The more extravagant your moves, the more points are awarded - a 360 degree mid-air spin is worth more than a 180 degree skid. Once you've racked up enough points to score a medal, you head for the exit gate. If the time limit expires before you leave, your points will rapidly decrease. Which is all well and good, but the Stunt levels always felt a little bit too uncontrolled and random. We had the most success by simply flinging ourselves into the field and seeing what happened - sometime big points, sometimes not. Most of our attempts came to an early end when the car flipped onto its roof, necessitating a restart. There's a certain amount of brainless fun to be had here, something akin to smashing bottles at the city dump, but we felt it just didn't work as well as other parts of the game.
Left! No, right! No left! Up! Down! Etc!
All the different game types can be played with every one of the different cars and environments, which adds up to a vast amount of tracks. The cars all drive very differently from one another and can require some significant adjustment to driving style. The Stadium car is probably the easiest to control, with its low centre of gravity. The American Desert car is a live wire that'll go up on two wheels in a heartbeat, while the Coastal Roadster feels like it's made of lead and has the turning circle of an oil tanker. The other cars - rally, pick-up, Island racer and 4x4 - each have a unique feel that significantly extends the gameplay.
Sitting at the heart of TUF is a big, beating, multiplayer heart. Everything can be played in multiplayer mode, though in a slightly unusual way. In keeping with the game's focus on time trials, there are never any head-to-head races as such. Instead, a group of people have as many runs on the track as they can manage before the track session expires. A live leaderboard is displayed as you play, so you can see how your times are placing. It's not what you'd typically expect from online racing, but it works and is good, competitive fun. There are a vast number of servers available so you'll never have any trouble getting into an online session. As expected, Australian servers were far less laggy than those overseas.
The TrackMania online community is plugged right into TUF, via ManiaLink. This is an in-game directory of user created tracks, car models, skins, videos, competitions and teams. New assets can be 'bought' using coppers, TrackMania's in-game currency. Coppers are earnt simply by playing the game from day to day and by logging 'official' track times - you can make an attempt at a track an 'official' one, which will see the resulting time posted on the online leaderboard. You can also make your own tracks and sell them to other players.
Sure is purdy 'round these parts.
There's no doubt that TrackMania United Forever is absolutely packed with great gameplay, even putting aside the mildly annoying Stunt levels. If you've played TrackMania Nations Forever to death, there's still plenty of fun to be had with TUF. The Puzzle levels are almost all the justification you need to plonk down the cash but if you're still not sure, you can buy a month's access to TUF for about AU$6, or get six months access for AU$30. Buying the game outright will set you back approximately AU$40 if you get the digital download.
TrackMania United Forever offers a unique take on the racing genre, and proves to be much more addictive and long-lived that initially expected. It is lightweight and won't appeal to anyone looking for a simulation that's even vaguely realistic. As a game, however, it works splendidly and offers up a bucket load of high speed thrills and some brain-stretchingly kinetic puzzle action.
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