Trackmania DS Review

I am not a hardcore Trackmania player. Not for lack of interest, but instead for the fact that until last year my computer gaming options were limited to whatever scraps we Mac owners received. (Just to be clear, I didn’t end up switching to Windows or anything; I simply got an Intel-based Mac that can boot into Microsoft’s quaint OS experiment when need be.)

Absolutely positively not for a lack of interest, in fact. Being that I’ve always been more of a console gamer, few times have I truly felt jealousy over those games that I couldn’t play on my computing platform of choice, but Trackmania was unquestionably one of those times. Racing games where you tinker on and tweak your car in order to earn a particular license on an authentic replication of that one particular track in the forests of Germany? Not in a million years. Crazy, fast, arcade style racing, however, I’ve had a soft spot for when it came to certain titles. Trackmania, the first time I saw it, looked like what would result if you tossed a sports car onto the tracks of the world’s most ridiculous roller coaster.

That, my friends, was an idea for a game I could get behind.

I’ve played Trackmania–thanks in part to my insisting on a good friend getting it for his PC so that I could play–but I never had that chance to really own Trackmania and fully experience the game. So when I heard that the series was coming to the DS, I was filled with both excitement and utter shock. This series I had wanted to really get into for so long coming to my currently favorite gaming platform? Awesome!

I’m not sure which turned out to be the more surprising aspect of this project, however; the fact that developer Firebrand was crazy enough to try to take all of the epic racing action of the Trackmania series and somehow cram it into a DS (thus my utter shock), or the fact that they pulled it off to the level that they did.

Trackmania DS is not its PC older sibling; any expectations that it is should be squashed right now. This game does not reach the truly insane levels of death-defying stunts you can pull off in the PC version, nor does it contain any sort of online multiplayer. If you accept those points, and then take Trackmania DS for what it is, what you find is a legitimately impressive DS racing game that captures the spirit and heart of the Trackmania series in the palm of your hands.

The engine that Firebrand Games has put together here honestly is impressive. Jumps, ramps, loops, hairpin turns, drops, and other trademark Trackmania track pieces are here (just on a somewhat smaller scale), and while racing through them all the game keeps a steady frame rate. Your ability to see all that you’ll need to see to navigate each course isn’t perfect, however. While frame rate indeed was surprisingly not a problem, the simple act of cramming some of these tracks into a small DS screen unfortunately results in the occasional case where you’ll either have no clue where to go or won’t be able to see a hazard that you could have reacted to better on a bigger screen with a wider scope of view. A few times around the track, and you’ll get familiar with what you have to watch out for where; until that familiarity sets in, however, some of the courses can indeed be rather frustrating.

Speaking of courses, there are three main types available–Stadium, Desert, and Rally–each with its own specific car type that handling style. D-pad control can sometimes be hit or miss for racing games, but even with the Rally car and its extremely twitchy nature (which I actually ended up preferring after a while), once I got into the swing of things you can tell car handling via d-pad wasn’t an afterthought.

So, yes, while Trackmania‘s much-loved online gameplay isn’t available here, local multiplayer is at least an option. Stadium racer can be shared between friends via single cart download play, or up to four players that all own copies of the game can compete in the full roster of courses and multiplayer game types. Where you’ll probably end up spending most of your time, however, will be in the single player mode. Available to you are three main game types: Race (compete against recorded scores for the best time), Platform (things are less about shaving off time and more about avoiding obstacles and clearing jumps), and Puzzle (you’ve given a set amount of pieces to build a track that will get you from start to finish in the fastest time). Puzzle mode works off of the in-game track editor, a hallmark of the Trackmania series and something that thankfully wasn’t omitted in the move to the DS. The level editor you’ll find here is what I’d consider good, but not great; it gets the job done, no question, but in my playing around with it I never felt like it was quite as intuitive or easy to use as it should have been.

The track editor, I suppose, is a perfect example of the entire Trackmania DS project, and how hard it can be to take something that originally existed in a much grander scale and try to bring it to the portable world of the DS without losing any of the scope or spirit of the original game. In that regard, I consider that project a success. While it is not a game without faults, the simple fact that Firebrand Games were able to accomplish as much as they were is a feat by itself, and what they accomplished was created a game that is at the top of the DS racing game list in both technical and gameplay achievements.

B Good	Die-hard Trackmania fans may find the differences between the DS and PC versions a bit hard to handle, but for everyone else this is a very enjoyable arcade-style racer that you'll find fun no matter what your level of racing game expertise may be.
Trackmania DS was reviewed using review code, physical copies, or hardware provided by Atlus. Scores are graded on a scale of E (Bad) to S (Special) in homage to Japanese video game grading scales, with the understanding that an S still does not denote a "perfect" score. Scores may have been adjusted from the original source to better fit my personal scale.