REVIEW – Milestone has branched out into a new genre, this time not with motocross (Monster Energy Supercross), racing bikes (MotoGP), street racing (RIDE) or minicar racing (Hot Wheels Unleashed), but with monster trucks, or cars with big wheels and several meters in length.

Suffice it to say that Milestone’s game, at first glance, is perhaps the best we’ve come to expect from the Italian studio, but there’s a certain element that seems out of place this time, and the end result is not so great.

Let those engines roar

Monster Jam Showdown (MJS from now until the end) features real monster trucks that can be driven in off-road races and events. Examples include Pirate’s Curse, Dragon, Earth Shaker, El Toro Loco, and Soldier of Fortune. This is about the end of the simulation, as the game has become quite arcade-y, which is a big step backwards compared to Ride 5 for example, although it is true that this work was not intended to appeal to the simulator audience. You can see this in the visuals of the menu, where the huge font sizes and the almost vomit-like color palette are reminiscent of Need For Speed Unbound, for example. That alone could divide the audience. Seven options (at least on PC): The Showdown Tour covers the career mode, multiplayer is obvious, as is the garage, you can practice on the training ground, settings is obvious again, there is already a store (shop), and Exit is obvious again. The gameplay isn’t very similar to the previous Milestone games (maybe except Hot Wheels Unleashed), as the tracks can have forks, there are also big jumps scaled for the big cars, and when you jump over the targets scattered around the tracks, the nitrous, which is essential for the cars, is also refilled (if you don’t have enough, because you get it automatically).

There can be up to eight cars on the tracks, but there will also be races where you only have one opponent. Meanwhile, we should also look at the physics, because this is not a bike or an F1 or a street car. We are talking about large vehicles. The mass of these cars is huge, but you also have to consider the distribution of the mass: the top half of the cars is where most of the mass is. So if you’re not careful, you’re going to roll over at speeds that should be on TV. So you have to learn how to handle it. If you come here after Forza Horizon or DiRT (if you have to mention offroad titles…), you’ll have to go through this process, but it’s not that hard to get used to. A good example is the Extreme Freestyle event, where the goal is to get as high a score as possible (and beat your competitors). To do this, you have to perform tricks. It’s not a random episode of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but it’s a possibility…

An experience for young people

This idea is also true because, in addition to the main menu, the interface is very reminiscent of the main menu, with its multi-colored interface. The graphics are good, but the motion blur is perhaps a bit overdone, so the blurriness can be distracting. The music is exactly what you would expect from the genre, and that can be very subjective. The physics, on the other hand, are a bit odd. When you drive your monster truck into a small jumper, it’s strange that you get blown up about 10-15 cars’ worth of height. Even THPS was more realistic than this (even there you couldn’t do a 900° trick without cheating, but you could jump quite high). The interface deserves some more thoughts. Again, the more modern style is noticeable with the minimap in the lower left corner and the speed in the lower right. For the challenges (of which you should loosely think of more than 150… for example there is such a thing as doing a trick with a certain vehicle X times) you get experience points for completing events, so you can level up. That way you don’t have all 40 cars at once (the garage had that many numbered slots). The Showdown Tour is usually location specific (Colorado, Death Valley, Alaska…) and there will be variety here. When racing in the desert, be prepared to have near-zero visibility pretty damn quickly if you don’t get ahead of the field, and without the help of the accessibility/easier-to-play features familiar from Milestone games, it won’t be easy at first.

When you get to a Best Trick event in a career, you’ll have to stick to a single combo. Only by performing the tricks in the top right corner will your multiplier increase (and thus your score). There’s also Head to Head, which is the equivalent of a 1v1 race in a knockout championship system (extreme version: you can fight it outdoors, even in the Alaskan snow). The goal is to complete a course marked by smoke bombs faster than your opponent. By the way, under the multiplayer option, you can be glad that MJS offers split-screen in addition to online. For Extreme Freestyle, it’s recommended not to push the limits with combos at first, because if you end up in a wall or on the roof, you’ll lose everything you’ve accumulated in that combo (and arenas are more likely to have a slippery floor underneath you, so even if you don’t end up toppling over, you’ll probably slip or send your car into a wall!). So far we haven’t talked about how the cars themselves sound: well, you can’t complain about that, because they sound pretty good. This is often a weak or average point for Milestone products, but in this case it’s not really a good point. There’s also a photo mode in the replays, and you can apply multiple filters, camera angles and masking (e.g. water drops), and given that there are notorious (at least in the US market, yes) monster trucks in MJS, it was probably a good idea to have this packed in at launch. At least they were prepared for this.

Is it only recommended in smaller doses?

Another common element in Milestone’s games is that you can customize your profile to some extent, such as your background, icon, badges, emblems, or your driver’s end-of-race celebration. In the settings, it’s easy to create a unique gaming experience. The difficulty of the AI cannot be tuned by percentage, but whatever. It can be a manual gearbox, you can adjust the speed of the offline game (even slow it down), it can help you steer, brake, accelerate, or steer the rear wheels, drift, or when your vehicle is flying. Fortunately for us, the game doesn’t leave us in the dark when we don’t know how to perform a certain trick (e.g. in Best Trick). Then you have to stop the game and look at the Stunt List option. It’s a good idea, and it’s very useful (and within that there’s the basic, the larger mega, and the ultra trick list…). It’s a funny sight to see a school bus spinning in the air (there really is such a thing: Higher Education, it’s the 33!). You can increase your trick score with the challenges, and that’s what you’re playing with, but you have to ask yourself: wouldn’t it be better to play in shorter doses? In an hour or so you see all the race modes and they are too repetitive. That’s why the game lost half a point on a 1-10 scale…

Would be good for PSP

The short races and often repetitive race modes make Monster Jam Showdown seem a bit lost. This game would have been fine on a PSP or PS Vita. Nowadays, however, a Nintendo Switch might not have been a suitable target platform for it (it’s also been released on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, so it’s a typical cross-gen title, which is odd since the PS4/X1 duo is now almost 11 years old). But that aside, the game ultimately gets a 6.5. If it were a little less repetitive, it would be a 7, and if the interface wasn’t so colorful, it would be a 7.5. If the physics were a little better, it would definitely deserve an 8/10. The game isn’t bad (and the rating is a bit subjective: it can be taken as a 7), but it’s better with friends. Alone it gets repetitive quickly. You can have fun with it, that’s not the problem, it’s just that it’s only good as a starting point. These monster trucks are not very well known around here, so you could call it a bit of an afterthought. It’ll probably be a PlayStation Plus Essential title in a year’s time, but until then it’s a recommended purchase if, say, DiRT 3 was a hit at the time and this type of vehicle might have been a favorite.

-V-

Publisher: Sony Milestone

Developer: Milestone

Style: monster truck, car

Release: August 29, 2024.