It's a flawed but addictive game with a fun sandbox mentality.
User Rating: 7.6 | TrackMania (2003) PC
With a gaming world jam-packed with high production values, it’s both surprising and refreshing to see a game like TrackMania take the medium back to it’s innermost core; one of simplicity and challenge. TrackMania’s claim to fame is its simple and addictive editor that allows you to piece together different track building blocks to make your very own course, but it’s not just a one-trick pony; a highly challenging single-player mode requires you to be creative and crafty in its puzzle mode and just plain fast in its racing mode. Though TrackMania’s budget-title roots subject it to a poor audio and visual presentation and the game has some faults, anyone looking for an elegantly simple puzzle game will definitely find a lot to like about TrackMania. As aforementioned, TrackMania’s editor is its most attractive feature. After choosing from either a Tibet-inspired snow environment, a dry desert area, or a plain full of lush greenery, you are issued a plethora of different pieces, some of which remain the same in all the environments (albeit changed in aesthetic to suit the surroundings), and some that are completely unique to a single setting. The track editor is quite simple; you click on a piece and press down the spacebar to lay it down onto the map, and if you want many of the same pieces in sequence, you simply hold down space and start dragging the pieces around. You can manipulate the height of your track via ramps and slopes and can add tons of fantastical pieces like full-pipes that let you drive upside-down or on the side, loops, speed boost pads that seriously pick up any slack you may have made, and so on. You can use either the mouse or the keyboard to build your track, and this is, unfortunately, one of TrackMania’s flaws. All the functions that are necessary for the fabrication of a track, be it raising or lowering the height of a track piece, selecting different classes of pieces (which are grouped according to their properties), rotating the camera and the like, but some functions are clearly suited to one or the other, which can makes things a bit of a juggling act. For example, clicking the arrow buttons with the mouse is supposed to rotate the camera in the desired direction, but it will oftentimes simply not respond to your command. So then the hunt is on to search for the keyboard’s camera rotation function. This can be vice versa depending on what you’re trying to do, and it results in a control scheme that’s unconventional but can be adjusted to over time. Another and slightly more severe problem is the lack of an “undo” button. You see, if you are handling a piece that’s really big and happen to use an erase function, it will delete all of the pieces in the way in an attempt to fit that piece in. With the lack of the undo feature, however, you will be forced to rebuild that part of the track, which can be easier said than done if you’ve built a lot around it and numerous obstacles obfuscate your view. This really isn’t as bad as it sounds, since a problem like the example above will rarely become reality, but when it does, you’ll wish that an undo function was added to this game before release. At any rate, your tracks will be far from impressive at the game’s outset, since the amount of “coppers” (the in-game currency) you have to build any given track is limited to three-thousand, and that doesn’t buy you much; for example, a standard tile of road that’s roughly the size of a car in length will set you back about forty coppers. This is where the game’s single-player mode steps in to give you solace. The game’s single-player experience is three-fold, split up into “race”, “puzzle”, and “survival”, the most enjoyable of which is certainly the puzzle mode. In it, you are given the challenge of completing a course using a select variety and quantity of pieces and then racing it to try and beat the target time. Being crafty is the name of the game here; one course has a very long, winding sequence of roads and a very fast target time. If you use your brain, though, you’ll discover that the end of the course is just behind you, several stories down, without any sort of obstacle in the way. So, instead of driving all the way through the course, you can simply back up, drop down, and finish in a lean couple of seconds. Others can get a lot more complicated than that; a later-on course has you trying to drive up a ramp with a speed booster that points toward you and pushes you back to the start. Luckily, a speed booster pad adorns your path at the start, though it doesn’t have quite enough kick. Using your limited road piece, you must build a circular track next to the speed booster so that you can keep looping around to it to pick up speed. Then, you can race up the hill and, a split second after hitting the reverse speed boost, slide one eighty so that the force, will drive you upward toward the finish line. Challenging? Yes. Frustrating? Occasionally. But the cleverness of TrackMania’s puzzle mode helps you forget about such things. Every challenge you complete will earn you coppers to use in the construction of your tracks to whatever environment type the challenge was on. Race mode is, in loyalty to its name, a series of races. On second thought, “race” may not be the right word, since you are up against a sole ghost competitor who, in addition to being transparent, simply represents the target time you need to complete. In essence, this mode is essentially the time trial portion of the puzzle mode isolated. Some of the tracks have a unique twist to them that makes deciphering them a moderate challenge, the ease of which your can controls and the lack of any sort of physics engine makes the race mode a breeze, and consequently, the easiest way to earn coppers for your favorite environment. Lastly, Survival mode has you compete in a series of races, which you cannot lose. No restarts are allowed here, though you will automatically respawn at the last race checkpoint (if the course has one) if you meet your demise. This mode is thoroughly challenging, since the courses are designed in such a way that the slightest mistake will send you careening of the side of the track and most likely your doom. However, this mode tends to have a negative challenge associated with it; losing a survival series won’t have you coming back and trying again, eager to learn from your mistakes; instead, you’ll most likely just become frustrated and switch to the game’s better two single-player modes. TrackMania has no real multiplayer modes, but it does have a community that’s nothing short of incredible; the game has a small but devoted group of fans who are constantly making insane tracks and uploading them onto the official website, making them freely available to you. As if there wasn’t enough value in the game’s offline modes, you can attain hundreds of quality tracks, free of charge. You of course have the same the power, as well as the ability to rate and review tracks. The only place where TrackMania really falters is its presentation; since it is, in fact, a budget title, the visuals and the audio in particular just don’t cut it when placed side by side with other PC (or console) games. The game’s built-it-yourself mentality doesn’t lend itself well to quality visuals, since you get a flat plain to have lots of building space. However, if you give your track enough attention, it can look quite good; each setting comes with natural objects (be they trees, cacti, or rock formations) that you can place to give your track a nicer look, and you can even build mountains that, aside from adding to the look of your track, can be used to house underground sections of your creation. Still, more could have been done in the way of visual effects and overall look of the game. Audio-wise, the game is spectacularly average; the low quality midi-music is tinny and irritating, and all of the engine revs and screechy skids sound pretty bland. Though the presentation is certainly less than optimal (or even less than just plain good), that’s really not what TrackMania is about; it’s about being able to build your own masterpiece of a track. It’s about finally beating one of those “I can’t believe I didn’t get that sooner!” types of challenges. Most of all though, TrackMania is about simplicity, and if you can look past the game’s flaws and can accept a game you won’t be able to lose yourself in for hours on end, TrackMania will fit the bill. 
