Trackmania Nations : Forever

Trackmania, courtesy of FOCUS HOME INTERACTIVE, is a free downloadable game that’s as addictive as snake on a Nokia mobile phone. It’s not a game you’ll play because it’s incredibly challenging, or because it’s quirky, it’s a game you’ll dip in to when you have ten minutes free time and have read as much trivial surfing as one person can.

The game has 4 solo game modes, Race, Platform, Stunt and Puzzle, over 65 tracks. Of course in the interest of good journalism, all of them needed to be played (which had nothing to do with the addictive nature of the game). It is in this mode the originality of the game is showcased: you race alongside a medal winning car – as opposed to just having a time ticking on your screen.  This is a fantastic feature: the power to watch and improve on your “opponents” game and therefore incredibly useful in the stunt levels. Unfortunately it’s by race ten you work this out; until then there are just weird ghost cars winning the race before you, and its incredibly infuriating when they do.

However whilst solo-play is challenging and quite brilliant; online play is impossible to navigate without a computer degree. To play on a server requires determination to find a server. The game is better enjoyed solely as a one-player racing on their laptop instead of playing solitaire. If you do manage to hook up to a server there is no level separation and like any adventure into cyber gaming you have to wait for the slowest person to finish.

There is a happy medium in the form of party-play; put simply racing against your friends as opposed to cyber-strangers! Online interaction of this is as infuriating as normal online play, but the glimmer of hope is that you can start a party on the one PC. Simply player one races; then player two; across a whole play list of games, brilliant! Unless your player one and player two is astute enough to correct your mistakes.

It is not a game that requires complicated driving manoeuvres just skill and aim. Therefore it is great to see the controls are easy to grasp and effective, you can restart simply by pressing delete, or restart from a checkpoint by pressing enter. Nice touches since the game is primarily about accuracy as opposed to speed.