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0 Monster Jam Showdown releases this week and with it comes a lot of interested fans of the monster truck series. Developed and published by Milestone, the game aims to deliver an experience as close to the real thing as possible, without getting into the driving seat. Releasing across all platforms, PlayStation, Xbox, PC and the Switch, get ready to take these 12,000-pound (weight) machines into the arena.
This Game Is Jam Packed
If you are a fan of Monster Trucks, keep reading to the end for something a bit different. Oh, don’t forget to let us know which truck is your favourite! You’ll never guess mine.
Gameplay
When you start up Monster Jam Showdown you get put straight into a nice easy to follow tutorial. Teaching you some of the basics in one of the three trucks that you are given at the start of the game. Being a Grave Digger fan, I instantly picked that truck. Albeit in it’s The Legend livery. Once you have been taught the basics, going forward, backwards, jumping etc, you are then released into the main portion of the game. This is where the Showdown begins. Picking between 3 regions, Colorado, Death Valley or Alaska. Each has their own individual biome and once picked you then get given a series of race types, each with variants.
The Race category comes in a number of options, Circuit, Figure of 8, and Horde. The Stunt category gives you Freestyle or Extreme Freestyle. Finally, Head to Head pits you into a tournament where it’s 1v1 over 3 rounds to find the fastest truck out there.
Whichever option you choose there is always something more to do. Progressing through the game unlocks more and more events for you to take part in. This will also earn you tokens for each category. These tokens go towards unlocking new trucks, well, it unlocks a face-off event where you have to both win the race and achieve the target score. If you get yourself first place with the target sore, that’s when the new truck unlocks.
C-C-Combo Breaker
Throughout your time with Monster Jam Showdown, you will gain points for a variety of actions. From drifting around corners, to backflips, and everything in between. Chain these moves together to gain those multipliers. And let me tell you, the freestyle events are near impossible without those multipliers! You also need some pretty high scores if you want to unlock some of those liveries for your favourite trucks. I’m looking at you Grave Digger!
Using the combos will get you some high scores and get you to the top of the leaderboard for that event. So make sure you chain those moves together. Even straightforward jumps are enough to keep that combo going. My top tip, throw a donut in there to keep that chain going. In fact, you can chain a left-turn donut with a right-turn donut to really keep that combo up. Top Tips from TC.
Time To Get Dressed
In Monster Jam Showdown there are 40 trucks straight off the line, with a decent number coming from DLC in the future. These trucks range from well-known ones, such as Megalodon and El Toro Loco to lesser known trucks such as Axe and Jester. With a lot of these trucks, they come with a number of liveries to attain through your play-through. Totalled together the number of playable trucks will surpass 150! To unlock these different liveries you have to perform specific tasks. Some are as straightforward as completing a specific number of events in a certain region. Whereas others are slightly more difficult, such as achieving a Stunt score of over 900,000 to get a Grave Digger livery.
Even once you’ve unlocked the truck there is still plenty for you to do. There are emblems for career goals, as well as unlocking player banners and icons so you can theme your profile. Not to mention the number of celebrations that you can show off when you hit that top spot on the podium.
Fun For The Whole Family
One thing that stands out while playing Monster Jam Showdown was how much the TC Mini Crew enjoyed playing the game. The difficulty settings are incredible, giving accommodations for each member of the family to experience the same fun. Letting my 5-year-old play on the 101 settings gave him a large number of assists, such as turning, accelerating and braking. With these on he was able to get first place in races and some stunt events. Whilst my 8-year-old took advantage of the easy settings and achieved the same results without losing any of the experience. As you can imagine they were both elated and declared themselves pros within a few races. That’s when I took back control over and ramped it up to normal settings.
The excitement from the Mini Crew when they unlocked a new truck or livery was incredible. Especially when it was for their favourite trucks! Well done Milestone, you truly have created a fun game for the whole family.
Outside the Showdown
If you’ve had enough time in the showdown mode, there is still plenty for you to explore. Go and check out your Garage, where you pick 3 trucks to showcase and make them hold some gravity-defying poses. Beyond this you have the Training Grounds. This is essentially a stunt arena where you can practice your favourite stunt. You can also navigate to the Challenge area. This is where you can check out the challenges to get an idea of the unlock criteria for each truck.
Once you’ve gone through all of that, you are left with the Multiplayer portion of the game. There is online or split screen options within Monster Jam Showdown. Unfortunately with the game not officially being released at the time of my review play through I was unable to check that out. I am looking forward to experiencing this though. Which brings us to the split screen option. Here you can challenge your loved ones to a race using any of the unlocked trucks from the Showdown mode. I would have liked this mode to be less tied to your own progress. And instead be a place where every truck was available. The Mini Crew’s favourite trucks were ones that took a bit of time to unlock, but thankfully with some hard graft from yours truly, they got to drive their favourites before anyone else!
Graphics & Audio
Graphically Monster Jam Showdown is gorgeous. Running on the Unreal Engine the trucks are immaculately recreated, even down to the stickers that adorn the bodywork. You really get an indication of the work that has gone into each truck when pieces are flying off and you are left with just the protective cage.
Each environment is lovingly recreated to ensure they all feel different. On top of that each region brings some extreme weather including: lightning storms, blizzards and sand storms. The only graphical glitch I found was when sunlight would reflect in the puddles causing a bright area on the screen. It could just be on the PlayStation version of the game, and overall it didn’t detract from the racing.
Now, Monster Jam Showdown wouldn’t be a Monster Jam game without a banging soundtrack right? Well, you are in luck, the soundtrack is pretty wicked. With heavy metal and rock tracks from the get-go. It doesn’t let you down on the sound effects either. With the monstrous supercharged 1,500 horsepower engines giving off loud, and I mean LOUD noise!
Longevity
Monster Jam games have been made for years, and the franchise itself has great longevity. The game itself challenges you at every turn. With the ability to ramp that difficulty right up and give you even more of a challenge. Add to that the collectables in the forms of liveries, emblems, banners etc. You will come back to Monster Jam Showdown time and time again. I know I did! I think during my review period of the game I ended up sinking over 20 hours into the game. And level wise I got up to around level 65! Needless to say, this game is a massive amount of fun, so much fun that it wasn’t until around level 60 that I started looking at the specific unlock criteria to complete my livery library.
Don’t forget that Online Multiplayer will be available on release, bringing a few online-only game modes, such as Treasure Hunting and Survivor to add to that. Hopefully, the community adopt this game as they have done with previous titles. Creating their own online championships with their own leagues as well.
Final Thoughts
Not had your fill of Monster Jam Showdown content yet? Then why not check out our Dev Interview here, where the TC Mini Crew asked all the important questions. Alternatively, check out what happened when we got invited to attend the Monster Jam Event in Cardiff.
There are a lot of positives to say about Monster Jam Showdown, and I hope reading this review gives a taste of what your experience will be. Having experienced the trucks in action I was able to appreciate the work that Milestone has put into this game. The effort to lovingly recreate the monster trucks in digital form. The love they have shown to the brand by putting all the different liveries into the game. All the while delivering a fun and exciting experience for the whole family to enjoy and take part in. In all my time reviewing games, this game has given me the most amount of smiles and the most joy.
Monster Jam Showdown receives the Thumb Culture Platinum Award.
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.
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