I played the original TrackMania not so much to death, but to the point where it was six feet under and the flowers had gone mouldy. In a way I’m not surprised by how little I’ve played its latest incarnation, TrackMania 2: Canyon. It’s the same jolly good physics-defying racing as the first, complete with the absurd track designs. But, for me at least, it just feels a bit too similar to the original.

This new video has piqued my interest, though. It reminds me of the thing that makes TrackMania great, other than the fact that you can drive upside-down: the community. I spent many a night up until 2am in that “just one more race” mentality, racing a hotchpotch of strangers on un-completable tracks. Once, I was racing three Swedish people on a track that simply consisted of a three-foot diameter tube and nothing else. We were all so determined to finish that we failed to see the futility of attempting to keep a racing car on a surface that it didn’t fit on in the first place.

Anyway, it’s a lovely, cheery video, complete with a kid playing the game (They seem to have negated the magenta cockskins for that particular bit), someone swearing at the game, some re-skinned rocks, some toilets racing through the game and, as testament to just how rock-solid TrackMania’s physics engine is, a shot of 1,000 cars attempting the same track. It ends with quite possibly the best home-made racing car rig on the planet.

So, this weekend, I might boot up TrackMania: Canyons and see what’s going on. While sitting in a pram.

After all this time, still nothing compares to that opening sprint. One car, purring on the starting block, becomes a swarm of 20 when the countdown hits zero. Latticed tyre tracks. Wheels clipping through bumpers clipping through bonnets. A turn is coming: easy left into easy right, then an exit into a suicidal drop. Three degrees off and you’ll fluff the angle for the jump at the end. But you’ve trained for this – and so, as the others make their mistakes, you glide dead-bang into the tunnel. Into the mouth of a mountain.

Come to mention it, nothing really compares to the middle of a TrackMania race, either, when everyone’s thinking that, yes, this is the lap they get it right. Or indeed the end, when some naughty terrain ensures that no one crosses the finish line forwards, horizontal, or at the same altitude as their windscreen.

If you’ve played the series before, you’ll know this isn’t quite how it works. A typical ‘race’ doesn’t end at the finish, but rather somewhere in the melee of often disastrous, constantly resetting, occasionally awesome time trial attempts. Everyone in a session races with and around one another – through one another – but only ever against the clock. They learn from their own mistakes, and from others that send cars bouncing off the approaching scenery. And, boy, do they bounce.



Playing the game accounts for one third of TrackMania. The other parts are creating (tracks, cars, music, minigames, general Eurotrash oddness) and sharing (via in-game personal storefronts, forums, YouTube, wherever). It’s been this way for eight years now, and the numbers involved are massive. Today, however, the one that really matters is the creating.

What does it mean when a game that’s been updated plenty of times already decides to call itself a sequel? If you ask Nadeo, it means the start of a new adventure. Season two, episode one. TrackMania 2: Canyon includes just a single terrain type, a single car/handling model, and a single ‘pure’ racing mode. No platforms or puzzles. No cities, islands, or stadium. The changes are seemingly few, but in a game of degrees and milliseconds they can feel huge.

The handling is no longer that of a toy racer. The new car is heavier, throatier, and it drifts big-time. Unlike the first game’s vehicles, it has no air-brake. That means greater surrender to the science that kicks in when, after all that panicked steering, you finally hit a jump. The tracks feel more natural, the cars animal. Is it better? Try ‘different’, like Stunt Car Racer meets Daytona.



The Canyon, for a place made of pluggable building blocks, is magnificent. A Scalextric of the gods: bored into mountains, soaring over lakes, twisting against rhyme, reason, and gravity beneath a Segablue sky. And the light: baked into the rock, lost in the cracks, gluing it all together and bringing it to life. It’s a static environment, too, which means that it’s all precalculated by the track editor. Result: you don’t need godlike hardware to play it, even in the new splitscreen mode.

As you can tell, I get rather high on TrackMania. It appeals to my inner geek with all its outward-facing technology. If I want to take a screenshot, I can spend hours on the camera angle alone, or on adjusting the replay timeline of every car. Then I can impose – heavens – 100x antialiasing on the scene. I can pretend to know what ‘GPU/CPU synchro’ really means. I can take longer making a movie about driving in circles than it took to make Inception. I can build and paint cars and then make myself some Planets, the game’s new virtual currency. I can build a casino to waste them in, or a bank to lend them to someone else. And a digital bailiff to go smash that person’s fingers? Probably! I can – which is to say I could – script all kinds of marvellous things. If only someone would show me how.



Ah yes, the comedown. Being a ‘community-driven’ game by a studio so small it could barely populate a race, TM2 has no manual. Not quite, anyway. Not yet. Instead it has a wiki, designed to silence the abject what-the-fuckery from newcomers on the forums – but it raises more questions than it answers. Grilled about the lack of documentation, a studio spokesman posted: “No one at Nadeo knows every feature of the game. We are about twenty people, adding sometimes more than five or six features a day (like keyboard shortcuts, buttons, player page options, new dialogue boxes, maniahome...). I don’t know a single thing about the Media Tracker, and nobody else than me knows the whereabouts of the ManiaScript.”

This is the candour people love about Nadeo – even when, as happened recently, a power cut in France made most of the game temporarily unplayable. The angry and confused were then told by its second-line support people, the community elders themselves, that they should wait in silence or discover the rest of the game. Build a car, edit a replay, or toy with the slightly-improved track editor. Which is fine if you’re a veteran, or have a decent grasp on the game’s sprawl of user-developed content.



But what if you don’t? Sure, the track editor is simple in principle, but it can seem anything but when nothing you select or do conjures a tooltip, warning, or log entry of any kind. It gives you the right number of tools and blocks to ‘get it’ quickly, then get inventive and build tracks like the official ones. But it’s far from painless when it fails to identify what you’re trying to do (drive a road through a cliff, maybe), or even hazard a guess. An entire layer of things we take for granted is missing from this toolset, requiring players follow an online paper trail of variously handy tutorials.

Part of the problem is that Nadeo are so active in their community – married to it, effectively – that they think the game is spoken for. A major change as to how official time trials work, for instance – you have to get the gold medal time in practice first, then wait five minutes between attempts – was left a mystery for new players. Also, as with older games in the series, large portions of its ‘interface’ are just jumps to websites and forums. Others might prefer the term: ‘massive bloody holes where the user interface should be’.

Don’t get me wrong: TrackMania 2 is a beautiful, heart-stopping, narcotic racing game. Its readiness to just sit there as operating system furniture, idling in the background before roaring to the fore, is a credit both to its engine and its design. To the PC, no less. Better still is how it has embraced different control schemes – the drift mechanics favour braking with Ctrl, or tweaking the deadzone on a 360 pad – while keeping the playing field level. And, for all that will be said about the changes to the handling, there’s always TrackMania United Forever. The TM community is huge, and no stranger to divided loyalties. Why be frightened of change?



I’ve built tracks and made ‘paks’. I could tell you just what speed of footage creates just what kind of motion blur, and the advantage of using a Hermite-interpolated custom camera. I am a proud TrackManiac. But this game is not for everyone, and I’ll even go one further: after all this time – with the name of one of the world’s biggest publishers splashed across cars and tracks – I’m not sure it’s enough.

Maybe Nadeo have some strange Peter Pan complex. Maybe Ubisoft have some strange ‘what the hell have we gotten ourselves into?’ complex. Whatever the reason, TrackMania should have been ready at launch. Obviously there’s a whole lot more to come, but basics like the interface should have been immaculate, or at the very least presentable. It should have had tutorials, pop-ups, tooltips – the works – springing from every mode and button, not sitting on someone’s esoteric fan site. It should have been bug-free and user-friendly, yet its editors are quirky at best. It should be conquering the world.

Review by Duncan Harris.

Here's some lovely footage of Trackmania 2 shot by some folks on the beta, spotted on RPS. The absurdly smooth driving skills make us think that it might be a well-programmed bot doing the driving in this one. Every turn is nailed with unflinching perfection, which means we're free to coast along and enjoy the gorgeous new environments.

Like the first games, Trackmania 2 will ship with powerful editing tools that will let players create and share new tracks. The first game, TrackMania Nations Forever, is free to download from Steam. The sequel is due out later this year. Check out the official Trackmania 2: Canyon site for more.

Nadeo's International Project Manager, Edouard Beauchemin has shared new Shootmania details with PC Gamer. We fired questions at him before having "one more go" on the upcoming Trackmania Canyons at Ubisoft's Summer Showcase. Three hours later, I left the booth.

Shootmania is an ambitious user-driven sandbox of an FPS. Users will be able to create their own gametypes and maps in a few minutes, similar to how the Trackmania community create their own unique courses. I asked Edouard whether Shootmania will feature some form of persistent levelling system similar to the ones featured in most modern FPSs.

It wont. According to Edouard, "A whole experience system could have been implemented into Trackmania, but a game based on skill is more interesting for the people we like to play with. With Shootmania, it's the same thing. It's based on skill. There are no RPG mechanics. We want to make it as pure as possible."



"Trackmania is the purest arcade racing game we could come up with and we hope to do the same with Shootmania – the purest FPS that could come up with."

Shootmania is set to be an instantly gratifying experience: "It's going to be a pure run and gun game. Go through it, bring your friends and shoot! Even for weapons – we limit it to a few so you don't have to think about buying the right weapons at the start of the game. You'll come with a gun in your hand and you'll start shooting. It's got a fun spirit. You're not pretending that you're a sniper from the US army. You're there to enjoy your game."

I asked Edouard if he's nervous about the team's lack of experience in other genres.

"It's the question that everyone is asking. We're asked ourselves first. We've been asking it since 2005 when we started to work on Shootmania. We're extremely pleased with how it looks and plays, and the possibilities you can have in the game."

More on Shootmania, Trackmania 2: Canyons, and the upcoming Questmania soon.

Nadeo, creators of the Trackmania series, along with the upcoming Shootmania and Questmania title have been speaking to PC Gamer. Edouard Beauchemin is aware of the recent trend in the profitable free-to-play model, but says it's not the best option for the upcoming Trackmania 2: Canyons.

Speaking at Ubisoft's Summer Showcase yesterday, the international project manager said: "Free to play is so fashionable at the moment. People come up to us and are like 'Make Trackmania 2: Canyon's free to play' and we're like 'No - Trackmania Nations. That's completely free-to-play. You don't have to pay at any time. And we're still looking at 700,000 different people playing the game each month.

"We prefer to call Trackmania 2: Canyons “Free to Stay”. You pay at the entrance and then you stay for as many years as you want. Unlimited content you can download for free from anywhere. You only have the in-game currency that you exchange with your friends through the in-game economy.

"The spirit is good because you're not saying “Oh! That person stole my item that I paid one Euro for. Give it back!” It's fun. It's a game. You pay 20 Euro and you enjoy it."

The UK/US pricing for Trackmania has not been annouced yet. €20 converts to £17.54 or $28.29. We'll have more on Trackmania 2: Canyons soon. Until then, take a look these amazing screenshots and read our latest feature.

TrackMania's best courses looked like lumps of concrete spaghetti. They were a mess of gravity defying banks and loops, broken up with ridiculous jumps and a hundred different ways to hurtle to your death. The latest TrackMania 2: Canyon trailer shows that the sequel will be staying true to the bendy madness of the original.

These new screens prove it's going to look outstanding. Get a closer look below.

For more news on TrackMania 2, keep an eye on the newly launched TrackMania 2 website. The game's due out later this year.

TrackMania's best courses looked like lumps of concrete spaghetti. They were a mess of gravity defying banks and loops, broken up with ridiculous jumps and a hundred different ways to hurtle to your death. The latest TrackMania 2: Canyon trailer shows that the sequel will be staying true to the bendy madness of the original.

These new screens prove it's going to look outstanding. Get a closer look below.

For more news on TrackMania 2, keep an eye on the newly launched TrackMania 2 website. The game's due out later this year.

The sun-bleached canyons, the cars polished to within an inch of their MOTS, the cunning use of the word "Turbo" 47 seconds in. As pointed out by RPS, there's plenty of reasons to get excited for Trackmania 2, even though there's no confirmed release date as yet.

For more on Trackmania 2, read our full preview in issue 227 of PC Gamer UK, on sale May 11.

The sun-bleached canyons, the cars polished to within an inch of their MOTS, the cunning use of the word "Turbo" 47 seconds in. As pointed out by RPS, there's plenty of reasons to get excited for Trackmania 2, even though there's no confirmed release date as yet.

For more on Trackmania 2, read our full preview in issue 227 of PC Gamer UK, on sale May 11.

The first Trackmania was a free-to-play blast of fresh air in the racing genre. Beneath the straightforward visuals and insane, topsy turvy tracks it was a surprisingly competitive game. Global and local leaderboards provided plenty of reason to keep re-running the tracks, and a the approachable level editor spawned some utterly bonkers creations. Judging from the teaser trailer above, the realistic new look hasn't compromised the avant garde course design. There's no release date yet, but the official Trackmania 2 site says it's coming "very soon!" You'll find the first screen of TrackMania 2 below.