I like my racing games to involve racing, far more often than not. Doesn't really matter too much what surface I'm driving over, or whether I have access to weaponry to launch in the direction of my opponents, if a racing game involves racing, it's aight.
TrackMania: United Forever involves racing, but only against the clock, and the times recorded by the hundreds of thousands of players who are determined to push the incredibly simple controls to the limit - and beyond.
Forget what you think you know about how cars and physics work, and hold on tight.
Fun Times
You may well have come across TrackMania before, on YouTube, perhaps, as the algorithms suggest it to you because you watch far too much Gran Turismo Sport content. I know it's how I was first made aware of TrackMania.
Inside a giant, empty, grassy stadium are wild track designs that can look closer to something from WipeOut than anything else. Ramps, jumps, huge sweeping corners, and sometimes even obstacles make finding the perfect racing line a challenging task indeed.
Following the ghost of your best efforts and those of the target medal time of your choosing, you've got all the time in the world to set a record. With only four arrow buttons to worry about, TrackMania is an accessible racer to everyone, and with challenges that last less than a minute, it isn't long before you try again and again in an attempt to shave milliseconds off your time.
Frustrations
And that's what you'll have to do because that's pretty much all you do in TrackMania - improve your time by learning the ins and outs of not only how your car handles, but how the unique physics engine will consistently dictate what happens to your car at any given point in a run.
Time trials in any racing game are all about learning the best line, controlling your car in the smoothest manner possible, understanding shifting weight and tire traction and whatever, but in TrackMania, you've got to do all of that with just four buttons, and to actually get the best times on the high scores, you have to basically abuse the underlying mechanics in ways I simply don't know.
Because TrackMania is so fundamentally different under the hood, it can do a lot more than tricky courses to run time trials on. A section of the game is dedicated to platforming. In a car.
The floor can contain boost pads to speed you up, or engine killers to reduce your progress to only that which you can manage through freewheeling your car down the course. Naturally, I didn't have a bloody clue how to carry through enough speed to get up the first hill, and couldn't be bothered to try too many times after that, so I didn't do too much platforming or puzzle solving.
If you're bored of races and platforming, there's a stunt challenge section where you can tumble through the air for points, but this, too, was more of a faff than not, my car handling like a brick no matter what I was trying to do with it.
It's easy enough to restart and try again in an instant, but the reward I get from succeeding in TrackMania's easiest challenges isn't giving me any buzz whatsoever. If anything, actually playing TrackMania is making me dislike it even more.
Final Word
I spent about an hour going through various modes across all the environments that TrackMania: United Forever gives its players, all at the lower end of the difficulty scale because everything else is locked until you prove you're good enough, or have the patience to grind out a result, and put very simply, I don't.
I don't want to highlight the graphics, because they're more functional than fantastic. They're not the point of TrackMania, the actual gameplay is, but that gameplay isn't convincing me that I need to spend hours and hours trying to find that extra tenth of a second I need to turn silver into gold.
Each car is different, and each needs to be mastered. Every track is different, and they need to be mastered too. Blind turn up ahead? You better learn when to start turning into it blind, because relying on your reactions will not see you get the fastest time.
To some people, that kind of racing challenge is exactly what they want. That's why they sit in the track creator and make their own challenges for the world to try. That's why they make thousands of attempts striving for the top spot.
There's a sense of achievement you can get from that, but I don't want to work for it, not in TrackMania at least. I'd much prefer to watch this one than touch it again.
Fun Facts
The 1001 write up has a little grumble about the TrackMania series' naming conventions. If I've got it right, TrackMania: United Forever is an updated version of TrackMania: United which itself brought together three previous TrackMania titles into one package.
TrackMania: United Forever, developed by Nadeo, Firebrand Games, first released in 2008.
Version played: PC, 2008.