Monster Jam Showdown

I had a great time with Milestone’s take on the Monster Jam world. The gameplay is tight and surprisingly accessible, with these behemoth vehicles bouncing and flipping left and right in such fun and satisfying ways in both racing and stunt modes. With a great technical background, too, what’s a bit lacking is the inventive in the single player campaign, with merely a largely repetitive sequence of events to beat with little reason or rhyme – one that even shows how little variety the game itself has, as of now, before all DLC or eventual sequels arrive. Personally, that’s a prospect I really look forward to, because Monster Jam Showdown’s base gameplay is really good, so I’d really love to see the format get expanded upon from here on.

The races are fun, challenging, the drifts are a lot of fun to maintain and the displays, whether in Free Style or with the recommendations, a very nice detail for those who are starting out, have given me those feelings of wanting to score more and increase my multiplier in the purest Tony Hawk Pro Skater style. If you like arcade driving titles and want to have guarantees of quality, you should seriously consider buying Monster Jam Showdown.

Monster Jam Showdown is a new episode in the Monster Truck sports license. A game that seeks direct fun with a good amount of game modes and trucks, but suffers from being too limited in options. A technical section rightly focused on performance, with nice graphics, but audio design could be improved a lot. Maybe, for the next game, they could fix this lack of option including some customization tools and more scenarios.

While I may not have extensive experience with monster truck racing games, I'm pretty confident that Monster Jam Showdown is a good one, delivering knockabout physics and pleasing Unreal Engine 5 visuals, as well as accessible and immediate gameplay that places the onus squarely on fun.

Monster Jam Showdown isn't the best racing game of the year, but it doesn't set out to be. It's supposed to be an honest arcade game with an accessible career for everyone, and the developers at Milestone have succeeded.

Monster Jam Showdown distinguishes itself from the last two decades of officially licensed Monster Jam games by actually delivering a decent, if modest, serving of monster truck mayhem. It’s a great looking, family-friendly racer that feels good to fling over giant jumps, but it’s light on track variety and crying out for a deeper career mode and customisation.