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Home >
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> Results: Trackmania United
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by Michael Anderson
April 12, 2007
Go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way ... turn.
Reviewed for PC.
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Every racing game has its niche - some are about the crashes, others about the realism, still others about making the fanciest ride possible. The Trackmania series is all about crazy tracks and even crazier speeds! The latest entry - Trackmania United - looks to take the series to a new place: online. I love a game that knows what it is about and consistently delivers - and Trackmania is one of those rare games. Rather than adding layers of complexity with each new version, they tweak what works the best and add new content to highlight those things.
The thing that amazed me trying my first race in Trackmania United was the simplicity - the only controls for racing are the arrow keys, so you just watch the timer count down, hit the up arrow and go screaming through the track! No worries about crashing into other cars because the other cars are transparent and you just drive right through them - the focus is on speed, speed and precision speed. Of course, once you get further into the races it isn't so simple - aside from having to carefully manage the four keys to get through turns and around obstacles, some crazy items get inserted on the tracks as you go along. These include standard poles and banks, but also loops that require high speed entry, jumps with hazards at certain points near the landing, holes and even stall-points that shut down your engine! There are fun puzzle and platform modes in addition to the basic racing games - all of it is fun and very accessible.
Trackmania United comes with a very nice track editor and for the first time takes the entire single player and multiplayer game and the online community supporting the game and unites it all nicely within the game. There is already a bunch of user-created content, but now you can browse it in-game using the ManiaLink system. The game itself features a bunch of new cars, tons of new tracks, an in-game currency system in which you earn money for doing well and can spend it getting new content, and more. But the utter simplicity remains at the core - this game is about racing at insane speeds on crazy tracks. It is about the pure joy of speed and incremental improvement, and it is a blast. Get your arrow key fingers ready!
There is nothing remotely offensive or even questionable in this game. Trackmania United is quite simply about the joy of racing, and features nothing realistic in terms of damage or real-world accidents or anything else to bring the tension beyond just getting around the track really fast. Even the online modes and content are built using the tools from the game and are therefore all E-rated by design.
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> Results: Trackmania United
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