Normally there's an obvious strategy that yields bronze and perhaps silver medals, but there's usually a more devilish approach that has to be puzzled out to achieve a gold, and for this you'll have to use the editor to exploit the game's fondness for aerial activity amongst other things. The idea, for those who missed the first game, is that you're given a track setting with start and finish points and checkpoints and then have to use various prescribed track pieces to engineer the most efficient route possible, before entering the world and trying to achieve a particular lap time. Puzzle mode, meanwhile, was most emblematic of the original game and remains the element most cherished by the game's fanatical community. It's already stolen the heart off my own sleeve. Of all the modes, Platform best illustrates how Sunrise becomes a game of instinctive high-speed reactions, and how players quickly become acclimatised to things like the weight distribution and mannerisms of the vehicles and the world, and quickly come to love them. ![]() Why would you reset? Because the tracks are elaborate, rollercoastery affairs with enormous jumps, blind turns, Tony Hawk-style half-pipe transfers over water, and fiendishly designed hops, braking zones and other tricky sections that often demand thorough investigation not to mention enormous persistence to overcome. In Platform, a gameplay mode new to the sequel and now arguably my favorite, the goal is simply to reach the finish line whilst resetting to a previous checkpoint as few times as possible the eventual goal being to complete the track without resetting at all. None of the main game modes even treat the other cars as physical objects. Your speed increases more or less exponentially the longer you go without taking your finger away from the accelerator or brushing a wall, the exaggerated physics let you hang in the air for ridiculous amounts of time and even apply the brakes slightly to slow your aerial momentum, and questions of collisions with other drivers and damage modelling never even arise. The primary play modes may encourage fast and precise driving, but they encourage it like no other racing game on the planet. ![]() Sunrise, like its predecessor, shares these characteristics - most obviously in the way it says bollocks to things like boosting, handbrakes and other arcade tendencies and uses only the cursor keys for control - and after a while it wears that puzzle heart on its sleeve. All are united by a simplicity and elegance of concept and finesse in execution, with only the slightest of cracks emerging at the seams. He probably wasn't expecting me to recycle it in print, but it seems like the best way to summarize TrackMania Sunrise - a game whose lifeblood of racing is pumped by the heart of a puzzler.Ĭonsider some of the puzzle games I've been playing lately. Two additional single-player modes, "Platform" and "Crazy," are included to offer new challenges to TrackMania veterans.Ī wise friend once told me that you can try to be all things to all people, but in the end your heart shines through. ![]() This follow-up to the original TrackMania adds new tracks and automobiles to the fast-paced, online-enabled racing gameplay.
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