#Trackmania 2 valley cars series#

Each time you play a familiar map, you will constantly be looking for ways to improve your time. There are hundreds of user made tracks, but the best ones come around more often. You can just as easily spend five minutes as five hours playing, and you always feel like you are getting better. Short tracks and instant restarts just add to the overall feeling of вЂњjust one more levelвЂќ. Driving well earns you Ladder Points, and there is nothing better than seeing your ranking across the region increase. Fans know that multiplayer is pretty much the only option here. Of course, there are single player tracks, but I only played a handful of them for due diligence. The music is generally determined by whoever owns the server you are playing on, so is a mixed bag. Overall the graphics still look really nice, but no better than any of the other games in the series. Sitting back at the start line and watching the carnage in front of you unfold as vehicles pirouette through the air off barriers is a sight to behold. The damage modelling on cars is better than in Stadium, but remains only cosmetic. The lack of car collision just makes it all the more hilarious. Since the cars are slightly harder to handle, the start of races usually sees cars flying off in all directions at the first corner.

I imagine Nadeo has a gameplay slider marked вЂњPhysicsвЂќ on its games, and here the slider is turned all the way up to вЂњWackyвЂќ.

If you take your quest for the fastest time out of the equation for a second though, it is quite fun in a way that only a Trackmania game can be. It does add a slightly different game mechanic, but there is a lack of precision here that makes it frustrating. Anything but the deftest of touches will send you off course on dirt. Most of the tracks in Valley will spend at least some time off road, and this is where handling takes a turn for the worse. The majority of Stadium took place in man-made arenas on proper roads. The environments in Valley draw more parallels with those found in Canyon than in Stadium. This lack of control is compounded in sections where you take to the dirt rather than the road. Drifting here usually sends you flying sideways, meaning you will have to spend precious time getting back up to speed. In a game which is all about shaving hundredths, or even thousandths of seconds off your time, even a slight mistake counts. More often than not, this will cause you to lose a lot of time. It is a lot easier to drift this car when tapping the brake. For games that donвЂ™t seem to change much between each iteration, it is nice to see that you will be rewarded with a different experience if you splash the cash on each of them. This is a good thing however, as it shows that the handling models across the three games are indeed markedly different. Having spent the previous week playing Stadium, making the switch to ValleyвЂ™s car was tricky. The opposite is true however, as the vehicle is a lot less grippy than its counterparts. The car here is nowhere near as quick as the other two, so you would be forgiven for thinking that it would be easier to control. Each game has a different car, and ValleyвЂ™s is certainly the toughest to get used to. If you are new to the Trackmania experience, then Valley might be the hardest one of the three to drop into. If you are looking for plenty of opponents, then Stadium is the way to go right now. I am not particularly good at the game, but I am already into the top one thousand players in Europe. As such, you feel part of a fun, intimate little club when you start seeing familiar names online. Not a lot of people play Trackmania compared to other racing games, and even fewer are playing Valley than Stadium at the moment. And I tend to agree.ДЇor a beginner the game is really hard to understand at first, but once you get there it all just becomes part of the charm. The general response from people who enjoy the games is: вЂњSo what? ItвЂ™s Trackmania!вЂќ. An odd release schedule is just another thing to add to the seriesвЂ™ awful user interfaces and overly complicated track editors. ItвЂ™s not as if French developer Nadeo is immune to criticism, itвЂ™s just that no one seems to care. It brings a new car and new environments to race in, but if you havenвЂ™t been drawn in by any of the Trackmania games by this point, then there is nothing here that will entice you either. Canyon released back in 2011, Stadium came nearly two years later, and now Valley blasts onto the scene, err, two weeks after the release of Stadium.

#Trackmania 2 valley cars series#

If you read ChrisвЂ™ review of Trackmania 2 Stadium last week then youвЂ™ll know that the second instalment of the wacky Trackmania series is split up into three parts.