Review for TrackMania Nations Forever - Great looking, but shallow, driving experience

[Zyx]

Trackmania Nations is a mostly multiplayer game. The single-player part is just a tutorial and practice modes, and do not offer much of gameplay. The whole point of this game is the online multiplayer.

If you're familiar with Nadeo's other TrackMania games, you know exactly what this game is about. It's fast, unforgiving and you need quick reaction times unless you're familiar with the tracks. It's fun arcade driving, but there's not much below the surface. The continuing success of this series is mostly based on the easy to learn gameplay and the modding capabilities of this game. You can create new tracks and paint your car how you wish. Also, Trackmania Nations Forever is compatible with the TrackMania United Forever, so players on both games can play together.

As the name of the game implies, in the beginning the original TrackMania Nations promoted an electronic "World Cup" of sorts and because of that by default you represent your country with a race car coloured with your country's flag. Also, the leaderboards are country-based and playing for your country improves its rank. Besides this, there is not much "Nations" in this game as there are no team-based multiplayer modes or anything, it is every driver for himself.

As a driving game, this game is a bit too much about muscle memory and shaving the fractions of seconds off your best time. Then again, that is what its single-player cousins are also about. There are no collisions between other players, so some times you might feel that you're playing against the "ghosts" of other people instead of real people.

There are couple of different multiplayer game types, but mostly you're driving around a track trying to get the best time.

Trackmania Nations Forever doesn't include the controversial StarForce copy protection. It is a good question why a freeware game even had a copy protection scheme, and we're glad it is gone. If you still have the original Nations, do yourself a favor and update to this version as the installer will uninstall the StarForce stuff off your computer, if possible.

TMNF is quite popular online game and there are lots of servers available online. However, the massive amount of customization and server settings do mean that if you're mostly interested in playing the "official" tracks, you're quite out of luck. The quality of levels in rotation varies a lot and some times you'll be listening to Russian techno while driving tracks that do not seem to follow any logical sense. Also, your screen will be filled with all kinds of statistics boxes, as a last point driving home the point that this game is about shaving those extra microseconds off your time.

This game is probably one of the best *freeware* driving games available (at least best looking), which of course is pretty unfair as it is based on a commercial game series. As such, it is comparable to a game like Quake Live, which is a also a multiplayer-only installment of a popular commercial game series. It's a good game for some coffee break type of fun, but the unevenness of tracks online makes it difficult for new players to enjoy the game past official tracks.