Monster Trucks are absolute beasts. Take El Toro as an example – who is a literal beast, being custom clad in a raging bull motif – who weighs in at a bonkers 12,000 pounds, yet has enough bull-power to go from zero to thirty miles per hour in only 1.52 seconds. Then there’s Megalodon, who, despite have a non-aerodynamic, extremely enormous blue shark stuffed on its chassis, can reach top speeds of 70mph. Just the tyres of these things alone is awe-inspiring – an immense 66 inches tall and 44 inches wide – yet somehow significantly less-inflated than the tires of my humble Nissan Micra. Apparently, it’s all to do with truck bounce.
Considering all these admirable qualities, it’s a shame that the monster trucks of the brand-new official Monster Jam game offer an absolutely pathetic driving experience. They handle like lubed up bricks, have the consistency of paper mâché, ignore physics – not in a fun way – and go about as fast as me in my Micra up a hill on a windy day.
Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself, Monster Jam: Showdown is the latest game featuring vehicles from the world-leading Monster Truck league. This outing has been developed by racing game specialists Milestone; so, it’s understandable that expectations are high. From a looks point-of-view, Monster Jam Showdown certainly delivers.
The 40 unlockable Monster Trucks you’ll find all look resplendent, rendered to an exhausting level of detail in Unreal Engine 5. All the crowd favourites are ultimately available to race; including, Grave Digger, MAX-D, and Zombie. Thing is, most of them are hidden behind a tedious check list of challenges that you must tick off. Unlike the Monster Jam Steel Titans series, there are no puzzles to solve to find new trucks. Instead, you’ll engage in thrilling activities, such as… do the same race several times. As such, unlocking new trucks to gawp at is quite the chore.
Amazingly, even more uninspiring is the actual racing. The AI trucks are likely the most boring opponents you could ask for. Despite looking exiting and dangerous, they drive like a learner on test day. Each truck ambles along on its prescribed racing line and never alters from its intended route. Heck, you can ram an AI truck, and it will shrug you off and dawdle along as if nothing happened.
Matters are made worse by the nonsensical physics. Hit an AI truck at full speed and it will no-sell your attack like the Undertaker in his WWE hey-day, whilst your vehicle will crumple like a paper aeroplane and launch itself into a series of impossible flips – forcing a likely race-losing respawn. The same is true of hitting any object in the environment; with the terrible collision detection regularly trapping your truck against the invisible wall surrounding rocks, trees and roadside debris – again forcing a respawn.
No matter how you tinker with the settings, the controls are abominable. Either your truck just drives itself, or it skids around aimlessly as soon as you even think about touching a thumb stick. The best way to win a race is simply to drive unbelievably slowly and cautiously, edging around a corner like you are driving in a blizzard. This, of course, robs the game of any of the obvious enjoyment that should come with zooming around in a humongous Monster Truck at the national speed limit. Stunt races, where you rack up points performing outrageous manoeuvres like backflips and barrel rolls, are marginally more enjoyable. Yet they still suffer from the nonsensical controls as well as point allocation that appears entirely random.
Online and split-screen multiplayer are rather more fun, simply because other players drive in a far more interesting manner than the dull as dish-water AI. But still the confounding controls and tediously slow gameplay ultimately rob the experience of any enjoyment it might have had.