Monster Truck Championship was announced the year yet the game it looked great I was a excited by the possibility of a half decent racing game featuring the most American contribution to transportation. The preview of Monster Truck Championship was a little tough to really know what we'd get;. There’s never been a truly decent monster truck game. Secondly, publisher Nacon may have a solidMonster Truck Championship was announced the year yet the game it looked great I was a excited by the possibility of a half decent racing game featuring the most American contribution to transportation. The preview of Monster Truck Championship was a little tough to really know what we'd get;. There’s never been a truly decent monster truck game. Secondly, publisher Nacon may have a solid history, but developer Teyon a little-known studio with little experience in the racing genre was entrusted to turn the seemingly impossible into reality: a fun modern day driving game on four, massive wheels on Xbox One. Credit where it's due as Monster Truck Championship is one of the bigger surprises of the year, and Teyon should be proud of what it’s created. Despite the literally mammoth differences it has from contemporary racing games, and even though it was built from scratch, Monster Truck Cjampionship is an unusually fun and genuinely solid game. It’s certainly not perfect, it’s hard to pick out a single thing that couldn’t be fleshed out in the product is much greater than sum of its many parts. While the core mechanics of Monster Truck Championship are different from the rest of the pack, it’s not all unique. If you’ve played the awesome Wreckfest, you’ll soon realize there are more than just a couple of nods to Bugbear’s demolition racer; the visual look, graphical style, upgrade styled system, your faceless racer and much more are basically lifted from last year’s FlatOut successor. Even the core is nearly identical. It’s hard to believe that it’s a coincidence. While this isn’t exactly great to have somewhat of a carbon copy of sorts, it’s sort of understandable, given the countless commonalities between demolition derby and monster trucks and their target audience both in and out of gaming. These racing over the top, dirt-based spectacles of power that regularly descend into madness, and are traditionally favored by small-town America. By harnessing Wreckfest’s formula for success, Monster Truck Championship also shows the rest of the world what it can do fun and while not perfect its proof it's darn good. It takes it time to do so, though. Initially, MTC doesn’t feel all that special. Its slow-loading textures, serviceable graphics, not-so-friendly how-to guides, and relatively lifeless world don’t exactly pull you in. Aside from the growling, guttural engine noises, the sound effects are bang average. The enforced tutorial overstays its welcome. But once you get these guides out of the way and throw yourself into career mode, things soon pick up.
On the right track
Like Wreckfest, Monster Truck Championship sets you up with a bottom-spec monster truck, which you upgrade with gradually unlockable parts while you compete in the National, Professional and Major Leagues. Host cities include Charleston, Salt Lake City, Orlando, Kansas City, Kilgore, Foxborough, Minneapolis and Las Vegas, with each offering its own largely unique stadium and circuits.
Each of these leagues offers ten events, which are split into two-to-five nicely varied stages. Four styles of competition are available–race, drag race, freestyle and destruction–with a slight emphasis on racing. While this may be surprising to those of us who’ve only seen monster trucks destroying scrap-car-filled arenas, it’s for the best, because the race mode is MTC’s strongest suit. Even though the experience is stripped back–and far too easy at the rookie end of the scale, even for newcomers–races feel exciting and dangerous, but genuinely fun. The sheer power of the trucks, combined with the arcade-like gravity and the feel of the tracks themselves, gives way to absolute carnage.If you get the throttle-based launch just right this destruction usually begins with you slamming into the back of the driver ahead of you, but at the right difficulty, battles are constant, and soon see you balancing racing with damage management, much like Wreckfest. The AI can be overly aggressive which is as hilarious is frustrating. The biggest success in the Monster Truck Championship’s race mode is the game’s clever four-wheel steering mechanic, which uses both analog sticks to control axles independently, and in a surprisingly intuitive way. Not only does it give you that extra bit of kick around sharper corners, but you may soon find yourself opposite-locking around corners as proficiently as Doc Hudson in Cars. However, the racing is undermined by some obvious problems. Firstly, there’s no race map of any form, which makes circuits harder to anticipate, especially when there are two routes to choose from. The split timer is simply unfit for purpose; if you are first, second place can be one, then ten, then half a second behind you over the course of five seconds. While it serves up more than a hint of the deeper, more polished Wreckfest, MTC has finally made a game worth playing on your Xbox One!… Expand
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