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What makes a good arcade racing game in 2024? Aiming to be a bit like what the Forza Horizon series has morphed into, aside from the whole open-world thing? Yeah, alright.
This, I’d assume, may well have been the conversation that took place when Milestone began putting together its plans for Monster Jam Showdown. Showdown is the latest game to offer people like me – people who get a kick out of supremely silly vehicles shaped like giant bulls, hearses, or sharks which remind us of a time when the world seemed distinctly more wondrous and less terrifying – the chance to nail a backflip over a wrecked car and be far too embarrassed to tell our friends how much we loved it.
It does a pretty good job of that, ostensibly by focusing more on just being a good racing game, rather than specifically being a good Monster Jam game. Sure, you’re doing a lot of the usual Monster Jam activities. There are some arenas where you can freestyle, some short races around tight obstacle courses, and all the licensed monster trucks six-year-old you could ever want. However, this time around, it’s all tied into a worldspace that feels very much like it could belong to pretty much any offroad racing game.
Events are set across three real-world locales – Death Valley, Colorado, and Alaska – all rendered in fairly realistic fashion, as they would be if they were to pop up in a Forza or Dirt entry. One’s sandy desert, one’s muddy woodland, one’s snowy tundra, and you can race monster trucks through them just as you might a trophy truck or rally car. Each area also has a section of the map with its own purpose-built stadium to facilitate the whole doing tricks portion of the game.
It’s just a slightly different way of accomplishing the same goals as Showdown’s immediate predecessors, Rainbow Studios’ Monster Jam Steel Titans games, but it does make the whole thing feel a lot different. Mainly because this time the game isn’t split into two halves. While it hasn’t gone for a full Steel Titans-style open-world that you can explore freely in between races, Showdown definitely puts all of its eggs in that world’s basket, making for a game that isn’t – as those Steel Titans games were – effectively split in two. Where there was once an open world bit that facilitated longer circuit races and exploration, and a bit that allowed you to do exactly what Monster Jam and its trucks do in real life – travel to different arenas across the world, and compete in short races and freestyle competitions that comprise actual championships – there’s now one unified thing called the Showdown Tour, coated in a brightly coloured UI and vaguely trendy musical gloss that feels very Horizon or The Crew Motorfest.
So, what’s the racing action in this thing like? Pretty good, despite the minor hangup of collision physics that can occasionally be a bit janky. A nice balance has been struck in terms of making the trucks feel as bulky and beefy as they should at times, while also able to be manoeuvred around the decently technical tracks without it being like you’re trying to park a First World War tank at your local supermarket. The boost mechanic is a great help here, turning many of the races on longer circuits into ‘point and squirt’ fests where you’re constantly drifting and smashing stuff to build up the meter, before deploying a big burst to launch you over a jump or towards the finish line.
This also extends to the shorter sprints, which pack in more tight twists and turns to make them a true challenge of your ability to dance your elephant with massive tyres around a course via expert throttle control and dabs of rear wheel steering. When you jump into a freestyle, your job is to rack up multipliers in as rapid a fashion as possible – either by doing certain moves or a combo of your choice – without messing up and losing at all by landing on your roof or failing to do the bicycle it’s pestering you for. As with the racing, there’s just enough challenge to ensure even folks who eat sky wheelies, donuts and flips for breakfast will get careless once in a while, slip into an easy-to-make error and have to restart. There’s always a bit of risk to keep the reward of nailing a double backflip feel as sweet as it should.
All of that makes for a solid gameplay core to the Showdown experience, but the game does still feel like it’s lacking a bit of the personal touch. This is especially true in terms of customisation. You can make your character dab every time they win, but you can’t give them a unique name beyond your online handle, or customise anything about the appearance aside from a nameplate-esque splash. It’d be nice to have the option to build your own monster truck to go alongside all of the official trucks in the game, especially given the cool things that could no doubt be achieved assuming this came with a decently in-depth creation suite.
After all, playing into the main thing that makes Monster Jam trucks stand out from the crowd, that being their wacky designs, seems like a no-brainer, even if it would obviously take a fair amount of time and effort to get right. As is, the special upgradeable trait each truck has in Showdown are neat enough – if a bit basic compared to even Steel Titans 2 – reasons to keep you switching and trying out different rides as you play, seeing which boost is best for each event. For example, I was personally a big fan of using the classic Grave Digger for freestyle events, since it offered a boost to the points gained from pulling off several of the moves I tended to go for pretty often.
So, as I said, Showdown is a game which, while arguably feeling like it’s lost a bit of the unique Monster Jam flavour that even Steel Titans 2’s kinda corny open world with sections themed around different trucks had, offers a good overall racing experience. It’s got nowhere near the sheer vehicle variety that so often really makes the formula it’s going for properly sing, but if you’re just looking for a fun few hours of chucking monster trucks around, it delivers.
Monster Jam Showdown releases on PS5/PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch on August 29.