Sports video games, as a genre, have a habit of repeating themselves. When the real-world sport getting simulated doesn’t change, then it can become hard to justify charging players the price of a new game for something that is arguably the same. Some sports games can subsist or even thrive as a franchise through near-perfected gameplay, a dominance over the multiplayer scene, or tie-ins with official leagues. Monster Jam Showdown, from developer and publisher Milestone S.r.l., falls outside of this upper echelon. Splitting its focus between racing, tricks, and juggling a plethora of game modes, it comes up just short of the mark for such a saturated market. It’s fine, but it’s not magnetic; nothing about the game pulls me in to play more. I feel like most everything on offer here has been done better somewhere else.
The unique appeal of this game is, of course, monster trucks. And visually, they do make themselves known. The environments are wide yet also constricting, lending these machines a heft that does them justice. It feels campy in the sense that it picks and commits to a very particular aesthetic, one of instigated and barely-controlled chaos. The massive trucks are indestructible, but just about everything in their way is at risk of demolition from these stampeding beasts, already oversized bodies held stiffly in place by even more excessive wheels. The spectacle of eight racing monster trucks is one to appreciate, especially on tracks that encourage and almost mandate collision.
The gameplay does fall short of this vision of the game. Rather than barely-controlled, moving the truck around feels unwieldy, sluggish, and heavy. Part of this discomfort could be my unfamiliarity with racing games combined with an underdeveloped tutorial, but only part. Throughout my time with this game, the little things piled up to feel wildly unsatisfying. If your front wheel catches on the rear of the truck’s in front of you, you can’t turn or plow through them, so you have to slow down to break away. Rear-wheel steering is way better for cutting tight corners, but the boost button is on the same side of the controller so you can’t speed smoothly into, through, or out of a turn. Hitting other trucks feels like a sudden squashing of momentum, and it takes all the juice out of driving. I would say it would be better to have some kind of ragdolling for trucks that get hit instead of the dragging that happens now, but if your truck fully flips over like a capsized turtle you just have to restart. A button prompt literally pops up to tell you to respawn; there is no organic way to get out of that position.
None of these quirks of gameplay are necessarily faults; Mario Kart gets away with plenty of chaos on the racetrack. The issue instead lies in their disagreement with the structure of the game. Monster Jam Showdown feels like a party game, but it presents itself as competitive. The gripes I had are not ones I expect to just disappear at higher skill levels, and I can see these issues presenting lots of frustration to people trying to play this game as intended: to win. Across all of its major game modes, precision is what it takes to proceed, and this is not a control scheme that makes that feel good or achievable.
For what it is, Monster Jam Showdown isn’t bad. But if you’re willing to give up driving a monster truck, you can get every part of the experience elsewhere: tricks, racing, time trials, it’s all been done before.
Monster Jam Showdown is available for PC via Steam.
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Video games are my personal favorite art medium by far. I love how many ways an interactive story can be told, and I can't stop myself from getting hooked on a good puzzle. I'm a student majoring in game design and music, so I hope to make creative work a part of my life going forward.
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