TrackMania Turbo

TrackMania Turbo is a fantastic arcade racer that really stands apart from the crowd with its electrifying sense of speed and endless thrills both online and offline.

Trackmania Turbo is a triumph. It nods back to console racers of yesteryear, provides speed, action, addictive gameplay, more than a few "wow!" moments and beyond the bundled 200 campaign courses, provides a potentially endless supply of content in the form of a robust track creation system. Should you clear the solo mode, you can take your car out into online play and you'll find a whole new world of fun and enjoyable events that all work flawlessly. Every corner has been rounded off and every surface has been polished here, and that's much to the developer's credit. Excellent stuff.

And there’s a potentially infinite number of tracks for you to play on as well, thanks to the Trackbuilder. On the simplest level, you can let the game generate a track for you at random, approve it and get racing, but you also have three levels of tools to let you create your own masterpiece. The beginner and normal toolsets are fairly basic, but they let you quickly bolt together your own track in a fairly intuitive fashion. The advanced tools are much more intimidating and confusing to start off with, thanks to the twin radial menus that are introduced for item selection, but once you get t...

It’s great to see TrackMania back on consoles and, going forward, I hope Nadeo can earn new fans while keeping the veteran players happy. All told, Turbo is some of the most fun I’ve had with the series.

Nadeo have succeeded in turning people who normally wouldn’t care about breaking records on a track into drivers that do. Trackmania Turbo’s biggest strength comes from the restart button, located right on the front of the gamepad (or just above the directional keys if you are playing on a keyboard). You know when you’ve messed up and you can easily turn to the ‘just one more go’ button that allows you to start over again. It doesn’t take long before you end up hammering on that r...

A brilliant and beautiful stunt driving masterclass, Trackmania Turbo is fast, frenetic, fun, and only occasionally frustrating. If this generously proportioned and highly engaging arcade racer gets its talons into you the way it did me, it’ll have you compulsively chasing ghosts for ages.

Competing against friends to fastest times is going to be a bit of an addiction, again like Trials, and for only £25 I can't see many reasons not to give Trackmania Turbo a whirl.

One of the most unique racers of the last decade finally appears on the PlayStation and Xbox, and becomes arguably the best arcade racer on either system.

Trackmania Turbo’s high-octane eccentricity creates a highly addictive arcade racer that always leaves you feeling like just one more race.

Racing games have two extremes: casual and hardcore. One is not necessarily better than the other, but they tend to be distinct flavors. TrackMania Turbo somehow combines the two, appealing to both crowds. The gameplay is unmistakably arcadey but relatively tight, and the heart of the title is serious about shaving off every conceivable tenth of a second in pursuit of the best time. So where does that leave the rest of us in the middle?

Sometimes, Mania can be good

Republished on Wednesday 28th March 2018: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of April's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows.