Monster Truck Championship Review for Xbox Series X

In the high octane fueled world of Monster Truck Championship, developed by Tayon and published by Nacon in 2020, lives the start of your professional monster truck career. The high-intensity racing game was recently reformatted for Xbox Series X and S in 2021 with the intention to heighten the graphics and speed of the game in one swoop. The highly anticipated sim-racer puts the player in the cockpit of a 1500 horsepower machine with the intentions of lapping your opponents or leaving a wake of destruction and dust behind you. With any racing game, the most important part comes down to drivability, and Monster Truck Championship does a great job on making the steering and handling just hard enough to give the player a true test of their driving capabilities. Throughout your career as a monster truck driver you will unlock new events and leagues you’re able to race in all while customizing your truck and team members to fit your driving needs. 

Journey to the Top 

When starting Monster Truck Championship, you are greeted by your trainer who guides you through your journey of becoming a professional driver. The trainer has no use aside from giving tips when first starting off and explaining the features of the game. Although there is no in-depth storyline or plot to follow with your character or others; you’ll see yourself progress through the ranks eventually racing with the best of the best. 

First, you create your driver profile, which allows you to input your name and nationality, but no character customization options to edit your driver’s appearance. Next, when starting your career, you can only enter National League events where you learn the ropes and start to develop a feel for the game. Once you begin lapping your opponents and smashing their scores in destruction events or drag races you unlock more events, progressing your way through the national league. After that you move on to the professional league and eventually the major league where there’s no holding back. 

Events 

The sound of the announcers excited to see action and the harsh redline vibration in the controller right before the race countdown truly encapsulates the Monster Truck experience through a series of different events. There are four main types of events in Monster Truck Championship; circuit, drag racing, destruction, and freestyle. All are pretty self-explanatory and offer a range of options to a variety of different playstyles. Circuit races are 2-4 lapped races where you are faced with seven other trucks to compete with for first. The circuit races can be some of my favorite but aren’t as action packed as some of the other events. It seems that the start of each circuit race is extremely competitive while you try to push your way to first while banging through gears from the start line; but later on in the race once the trucks start to spread out throughout the race you rarely find yourself crashing and colliding into other trucks. The mechanics of the race are stable but it is hard to tell position-distance because the position indicator and the checkpoint-timer seem to not correlate correctly.

The next favorite event is drag-racing, which uses turns or jumps to create obstacles instead of racing in a straight-line. This 10-20 second race is one of my favorites because one wrong move and your opponent could have already crossed the finish line. Within the drag-races on Xbox series X when starting a race I encountered a flurry of bugs where if I skipped the cut scene of the race too early or input a wrong button I would get flagged for a false start for no good reason. The other two events include freestyle and destruction, which can be some of the most fun due to the amount of destruction you are able to cause to obstacles or your own truck. Doing backflips in a 5-ton machine is a joy of capabilities like no other. In freestyle you try to get the most points from doing tricks and combining them while destruction you try to flatten everything in sight. But be careful; too many wrong landings could heavily damage your truck and make driving more difficult. The toughest thing about these two is keeping your truck mobile while trying to avoid rolling over on top and not being able to move. If played on easy or medium difficulty you are given opportunities to reset your truck mid-game and get moving again. 

Unique monster trucks 

In a world of bizarre truck bodies or other classic monster-truck style body kits the garage is the place to make your wildest creations come to life and spend your fuel-injected winnings. The cosmetics in the game have a large variety and no two trucks could be alike. With a full color wheel of options for the paint of your truck you can let your imagination run rampant. Whether you’d want the classic Grave-Digger style body kit or a UFO monster truck; you could do it all. The game also offers custom paint jobs or sticker wraps to make your monster truck unique to you; along with different hood or roof ornaments such as push-bars or a missile straight out of the US military sitting on top of your truck for intimidation. The wide selection of parts and colorways appeal to the types of players that crave personalization and want to build their own legendary Monster truck.  

The garage also offers performance upgrades which you are able to purchase and increase your trucks acceleration, power, handling, and stability. Each of these serve as valuable purchases in making your truck more competitive as you progress through the ranks. This creates two paths for the player; spending money on cosmetic upgrades or purchasing performance upgrades as both paths can be quite expensive and leaves the player with a tough decision. Once you progress into mid-late game the event winnings become more and you are able to afford both if chosen to do so. 

Managing your team

The management section in Monster Truck Championship plays a big role in boosting certain stats that you deem worthy. Every new team member you bring on board will offer some type of stat boost (handling, gear change rate, income from winning events), but as all things do each team member will cost you some dough. When hiring a new team member they have an initial hire cost and a per-event fee which can add up quite quickly if you aren’t winning the big prizes. In the early game hiring team members can take away a decent amount of earnings from events and slows your progression in upgrading your monster truck. I found it not worth it hiring team members until mid game where the event winnings were enough to spare a couple dollars for payroll. As you progress throughout the game you are able to hire better team members which boosts stats more but can cost a lot more. To offset these costs you are able to pick-up sponsors which give you a timeframe (number of events to complete) and certain tasks you must do in order to complete the sponsorship. On completion of these sponsors they unlock new parts you are able to use for free (mostly cosmetic) and some sum of money which ranges depending on how hard the tasks are.  

Synopsis 

Some other features of the game are single player races which you can set up on your own and run events for fun. They don’t offer any rewards for winning but can serve as good practice or a more casual experience. There is also a multiplayer option which I had an extremely tough time trying to find an online match to play against others. Aside from troubles with match-making I strictly stuck with career mode in which I found was the most fun. The truck customization and performance tweaking creates a great creative outlet for players to spend their winnings on. 

Monster Truck Championship is well developed and has realistic physics when doing tricks or driving the monster trucks. It encourages the race enthusiast gamer to get into their own 20-foot tall machine and take on the challenge of the monster truck world. I give this game 8/10. 

Check Out the Monster Truck Championship Trailer:

For more information, please visit: https://monstertruckchampionshipthegame.com/

Jack Pas

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I am a very first-person shooter oriented player. I have been playing a lot of Payday 2 and many of the Xbox Game Pass games such as Sea of Thieves, Rage 2, and others outside of the Game Pass such as Call of Duty Cold War. I also share a passion for adventure games with intricate looting systems such as the Borderlands series and the classic Darksiders 2.

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