Iadnah

I'll make it short. If you like Trackmania, get Stadium and/or Valley. If you don't know what Trackmania is, get Stadium and/or Valley. Why? The Canyon car has very loose handling and is all over the track in turns, while over half of the available track pieces are extremely narrow and loops and wallrides are undriveable due to a lack of grip. Unless you limit yourself to building tracks out of the same 20 pieces over and over, it is very hard to create something fun in this game. The elimination of blockmixing (using third party tools to combine blocks) by the developers isn't helping. With the cheaper Stadium and vastly superior Valley available now, there is very little reason to recommend this black sheep in the Trackmania series. Its dead multiplayer is testament to this. Don't get me wrong don't take your money elsewhere. Just spend it on Nadeo's *other* titles.

Firstly, if you're new to Trackmania, get Stadium because it's cheaper (or Nations because it's free). Valley is the environment for people who are looking for a more advanced Trackmania. From high speed platform tracks to slow rally tracks, the Valley environment does it all. Compared to other environments, only Stadium can compare in terms of versatility and driveability, and the track editor is even better than the other titles with the addition of freely placeable blocks and cleaner block design with less clutter to get in your way. It is the most popular Trackmania environment for a reason. The main drawback... it's 20 bucks for one environment and one car. This is how Nadeo rolls, but Valley is their most expensive environment. It is worth it though.

It's like those side scrolling motorcycle games, but in 3D and with cars. Forget the single player campaign, it's about multiplayer and its thousands of user built tracks and servers with 50 people on it playing crazy maps. The game's low user score indicates that it is a divisive niche game: either you like full contact racing or single player (in which case avoid this like the plague) or you want a track editor or a lively multiplayer community (what are you waiting for?). There is one issue: it is essentially a HD remake of the old Trackmania Nations, which was (and still is) free. However, $10 is NOT too much for this game. Many people have played Nations for years it really is that deep if you're into what it offers. The other issue is that developers Nadeo have lost their marbles and are trying to push their horrible Maniaplanet platform which forces you to download patches for games you don't own and makes it all too obvious that every -mania title is the exact same game with a different car (or robots with guns in the case of Shootmania) and different tileset.. For good or bad, Nadeo are a unique studio, but objectively speaking this is an amazing game. Didn't we all wish we could climb into our slot cars as a child and drive them around wacky tracks with loops and compete against tens of other drivers? Here's a version for grown ups. Enjoy!

-this review is only about competitive multiplayer- I bought this game because GRiD 1 was fun online. This is garbage. Firstly, cars are separated by level but matchmaking isn't. Enjoy trying to keep your junk starter car on the road while everyone else has overpowered endgame cars. I get it, the cars are supposed to be balanced. LOL. Here's the secret: tier 1 Golf/Giulietta, tier 2 Nismo Skyline (being a realistic racing sim, the Skyline handles exactly like the one in Need for Speed Underground), tier 3 Atom or Caterham, tier 4 Veyron, other cars aren't viable 90% of the time. All of them except the first two are of course all the way at the end of their class and reserved for level 10-20-30 players. But it's okay, you can BUY THE UNLOCK DLC if you want to be competitive. This is literally paying to win. This is supposed to be a sim game, or at least a racing game. You know, a game about driving properly. I won't get into the complaints about drifting, even though every single one of them is true. Casual drifting can be fun, unless of course you were expecting a realistic racing sim. The problem is drifting AND the horrible (fake) track design. Literally every single track is a series of long narrow straights connected by hairpins. They did include a few licensed circuits, carefully cherrypicked to follow this exact template. Why? Because you can drift more easily that way! Duh! Unfortunately it is also impossible to overtake people legitimately unless they crash because the roads are too narrow to accomodate two drifting cars and there is no such thing as braking points, only handbrake taps. The higher level your account, the further towards the back you start, meaning past a certain point you cannot possibly win races without playing rough (unless you're a level 2 newbie who spent €5 on the Veyron and get rewarded by starting in pole position). At first some people regretted the lack of GRiD 1's demolition derby. Let's just say every online race is demolition derby whether you want to or not. Even if you don't play rough, someone else will, or a noob will crash in front of you and take you out in the process. There's an "impact rating" system which supposedly penalises dirty drivers. In reality, everyone knows by now how to hit people in such a way that the victim gets the penalty instead. Driving properly only to get blatantly (or even accidentally) plowed off the road and take a time penalty for corner cutting and a hit to your impact rating is so enjoyable. How to win touge events: get a fast accelerating car, get ahead before the first corner, then mash the brakes and intentionally crash into your opponent at the corner, he gets DQ'd for rough driving because you braked and he didn't. That's it. To further demonstrate CM's priorities, there is no text chat on PC (console port), instead everyone's mic is always on and you can only mute them between races; however there are detailed leaderboards... for your friends list only. Because social gaming and Facebook YO DUUUUDE. What a waste. Thanks, Ken Block.