

Refine by practice and you’ll do even better. Learn the track and the car’s handling and you’ll put in a respectable time. There are no stats to tweak, parts to tune, or any other feature that could give one player an edge over the other, so the only thing that’s getting you or anyone else to the finish line first is pure unfiltered skill.

The enemy is the track, and while you can race the ghosts of friends and bronze/silver/gold medal runs, or even go head-to-head, the cars are insubstantial so you’re free to plot the best path through the hazards without worrying about what the driver ahead may be doing. Drive a powerful car through an impossible course of ramps, jumps, loops and other surfaces that have no business hosting an automotive time-trial and get to the end as quickly as possible. The basics of Trackmania haven’t changed a bit since the first game in the series.

Trackmania Turbo is the fourth entry into Nadeo’s long-running stunt racer and it’s not about to start taking it easy on the player at this point in its evolution. Or at the very least it’s the key to the controller surviving, rather than getting twisted into a splintery pretzel of plastic shards and fury. Accelerate is nice, a quick brake-tap to instigate a slide is super-helpful, but reset is the key to surviving Trackmania Turbo. Reset makes every missed corner, badly aligned jump, spin-out, wall-grind, crash and flailing attempt at course correction ending in a dead stop as you drive nose-first into a rock disappear like it never happened.
