While there is the option to play across a LAN it is the internet where the real goes on. While the interface screens continue in their shareware stylings and are not the easiest to navigate, getting logged in to a game is a simple enough affair. Part of the account setup procedure requires you to input your country and the nearest big town so you can often find people who are geographically very close to you. You can be racing within mere seconds of having booted the game up and although there are not a huge number of game types available, from time attack to a plain old race the massive and practically unlimited number of courses more than compensate. Some of the user made tracks out there are absolutely huge and really hard but they mostly remain fun to play even if you haven't managed to cross the finish line after 6 minutes (built in courses are often under 30 seconds). The game supports up to ten players per track but lag is often a problem. While the lag will not affect your actual driving the display of your opponents will often be seriously screwed up. Sometimes their cars will jump all over the track, going under it over it Wombelling free. Sometimes the cars won't have any graphics and just the names will skitter all over the screen like a bunch of blind mosquitoes on speed trying to organise a mass sumo wrestling match. Even if you can continue your racing unharmed it is very disconcerting when the lag gets bad and this odes spoil some of the enjoyment of racing online. Hopefully with some more patching, (one is already up with some fixes and a lot of tweaks and improvements) this can be tamed down some more. Fortunately for us European based gamers most of the servers are nearby so the lag isn't a constant problem and there is also the plus point of there being lots of willing racers at reasonable times of the day. While the majority of players right now seem to be French speaking you won't be bothered what tongue your opponents talk in as the racing is king.

The has a few more niggling problems for the player to contend with. The screen can get very cluttered with lap time displays, the list of racers on the track and a few other items of information. Unfortunately, as of yet there isn't anyway to adjust what gets displayed. From the screenshots you can tell how cluttered it gets. Hopefully this too will be addressed in a future patch. The developers and publishers seem to be doing a good job on the community side of things and do listen to what the players think and want. At the time of writing there is also no league or any competitions in place, which mirrors the problem of shallowness that works against the single player game. However, come January there will be a league in place and it seems likely that more competitions will become available as the game matures.

The course building side of things is where Trackmania really shines. While the interface is not the cleanest nor simplest to use it does the job. And judging by what some people have already built and put the only limit is your imagination. All those coppers you win from races and puzzles buy the bits of track you will need to put together your own twisted tracks. To get enough pieces is a real challenge as you will have to do very well in the series events to afford enough to make a flat circuit into a warped house of fun on wheels. You can download other people's maps and give them a whirl in challenge mode, but it is online that you will find the best courses as people put them up for others to test and race on.

TrackMania is not quite the Stunt Car Racer for the noughties that I hoped it would be. Instead it delivers its own unique style of racing that should appeal to anyone who likes a good laugh while racing around the most insane tracks yet committed to silicon. The actual gameplay is so simple as to be verging on the childish but the amount of fun to be had will make you feel like a wee bairn again. It's a shame that there isn't more structure to the title, and there are some rough edges, most notably in the interface. But as long as you are not looking for realism or the option to adjust your camber you will get a good laugh from playing Trackmania. My only final reservation concerns the price, £29.99. Not wanting to sound unjustly harsh but really does come across like a shareware game tarted up for retail. I am not saying that it is amateur, it is all professionally done, but it does lack depth and presentation so I question whether or not thirty quid is a fair price (To those of you interested, I have seen some online retailers stocking this for £25 - Ed). I suppose it all comes down to whether this is your cup of tea. If you like your racers with real cars and realistic tracks you will really enjoy TrackMania's unique sense of fun but may be left feeling somewhat unsatisfied with the whole package. If your not a gearhead or just like games that challenge the mind as well as the reflexes then you should love TrackMania and will find hours of enjoyment racing and building to your hearts content. It is one of those games that you just keep on playing into the wee small hours.

82%

By Sam Gibson