Trackmania Nations: Video Game Review

Trackmania Nations is the most popular of the "Trackmania" Racing series. Trackmania is an arcade style, puzzle racing series. "Trackmania Nations" was released partly as a promotion for the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC). The Trackmania series has been relatively inactive until "Nations" was released, creating a huge interest in the Trackmania series. After the release of Trackmania Nations the entire Trackmania series sales jumped rapidly, and since then all Trackmania games have become fairly popular.

Trackmania Nations is a free, standalone, version of Trackmania, which includes 1 racing environment, and 100 built in tracks. As well as an offline single player mode, there is an online play mode. While racing online players earn points based on race times and placing, these points are used to rank players based on their selected nation, as well as overall. Trackmania Nations comes with 100 tracks to choose from, but most online race servers use custom tracks, most of which are high speed puzzle tracks. Setting up a server for yourself is also very simple, you simply click "Create Server" and you are ready to race!

Creating custom tracks in Trackmania Nations is very simple. Trackmania comes with a built in track creator which uses a block system for creating tracks. Track pieces are sorted by slope, angle, turn, and other categories making it very easy to find the piece you want to add. In addition to the simplicity of adding track pieces it is also very easy to add special effects to the track, such as camera changes, and text displays. Through the use of the "media tracker" these effects are created with a few simple clicks of the mouse.

Although Trackmania Nations is free, to get full access to features such as custom car skins, you must purchase one of the other versions of Trackmania, and then register it with your Trackmania Nations account. After linking a Trackmania Nations account to a CD Key from any other Trackmania game you can use custom car skins, and even custom car models. Through these skins and models you can effectively make a car look like anything you wish.

Overall Trackmania Nations is a great game for the price, and it is actually quite fun. If you like puzzles and high speeds this game is for you because it very successfully combines the two. Trackmania Nations ESWC is available for download at www.trackmanianations.com and is definitely worth the time to try.